Politico is giving Equitable Growth's fearless leader Heather Boushey a platform to argue for distributional national accounts. This is, I think, a very good sign: Politico had followed the National Journala model of focusing on gossip and personnel, but their willingness to give serious people the mic to talk about actual policy is a sign that they may be moving beyond the idea that their role is to provide celebrity gossip about ugly people: Heather Boushey: How To Fix Inequality: Publish Distributional, Not Just Aggregate, Growth Data https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/publish-distributional-not-just-aggregate-growth-data/: "To tell us how Americans—low-, middle- and high-income alike—are faring in the current economy, relative to other groups and to the average, federal agencies need to produce distributional statistics alongside the aggregate ones. That means offering not just one estimate of growth but several: growth for those with different levels of income, of different races and ethnicities, and also for variation by state or other levels of geography. Legislation has been passed that encourages the BEA to add the disaggregated data, but the law provides no new funding and doesn’t go beyond encouragement. If we do not change the way we conceptualize and analyze economic progress, we are unlikely to have very much of it. Better, fairer growth measures are a vital step toward better, fairer growth...
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