Listening to Gabe Zucman last week on this reminded me that Heather Boushey said wise things about distributional national accounts before the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee: Heather Boushey: Testimony Before the Joint Economic Committee: "The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases a new estimate of quarterly or annual GDP growth every month. Distributional national accounts would add to this release an estimate that disaggregates the topline number and tells us what growth was experienced by low-, middle-, and high-income Americans. Academics have already constructed such a measure. The so-called DINA dataset constructed by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman...
...Over the period from 1980 to 2014, average growth was about 1.4 percent annually. However, the bottom 90 percent of all adults saw income below this. Only those in the top ten percent experienced better than average growth. This is a new phenomenon. The DINA dataset shows that prior to this period, there was little need to disaggregate national growth because the headline GDP growth statistic was broadly representative of most Americans.... GDP growth, in effect, is now decoupled from the fortunes of most Americans. What was once a useful indicator of how most families were fairing is now unmoored from the experience of most families. It is because of this divergence that the Income Growth Indicators proposed by Senator Schumer, Ranking Member Heinrich, and Representative Maloney must be added to our monthly GDP reports so we can understand how the economy is performing for Americans up and down the income ladder...
#shouldread #equitablegrowth
