The effects of taxes on wealth inequality in Artificial Chemistry models of economic activity.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Banzhaf W
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8357169 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:There is evidence that in more economically unequal societies, social relations are more strained. We argue that this may reflect the tendency for wealth to become a more fitting lens for seeing the world, so that in economically more unequal circumstances, people more readily divide the world into "the haves" and "have nots." Our argument is supported by archival and experimental evidence. Two archival analyses reveal that at times of greater inequality, books in the United Kingdom and the United States and news media in English-speaking countries were more likely to mention the rich and poor. Three experiments, two preregistered, provided evidence for the causal role of economic inequality in people's use of wealth categories when describing life in a fictional society; effects were weaker when examining real economic contexts. Thus, one way in which inequality changes the world may be by changing how we see it.
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Project description:Entitlements for social security and occupational pensions present a major wealth component and play a central role for financial security. However, most individual-level data lacks information on pension wealth. By linking various data sources, this contribution estimates the present value of future pension entitlements in Switzerland for statutory pensions, occupational pensions and third pillar accounts and analyses the distribution of augmented wealth, which combines pension wealth and net worth. The CH-SILC survey from 2015 is used to estimate real assets, financial assets and pension wealth of retired individuals. The pension entitlements of non-retired individuals are simulated on the basis of their earning history from administrative records following the accrual method and assuming a real discount rate of 2%. When pension wealth is added to net worth, average wealth doubles, and the Gini-coefficient declines by 26%. The equalising effect is particularly strong for social security pensions. The wealth distribution differs strongly between the three pillars of the pension system; there are also strong differences between gender and age groups. In Switzerland, wealth accumulation continues after retirement age.
| S-EPMC7651273 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Taming the planet's climate requires cooperation. Previous failures to reach consensus in climate summits have been attributed, among other factors, to conflicting policies between rich and poor countries, which disagree on the implementation of mitigation measures. Here we implement wealth inequality in a threshold public goods dilemma of cooperation in which players also face the risk of potential future losses. We consider a population exhibiting an asymmetric distribution of rich and poor players that reflects the present-day status of nations and study the behavioral interplay between rich and poor in time, regarding their willingness to cooperate. Individuals are also allowed to exhibit a variable degree of homophily, which acts to limit those that constitute one's sphere of influence. Under the premises of our model, and in the absence of homophily, comparison between scenarios with wealth inequality and without wealth inequality shows that the former leads to more global cooperation than the latter. Furthermore, we find that the rich generally contribute more than the poor and will often compensate for the lower contribution of the latter. Contributions from the poor, which are crucial to overcome the climate change dilemma, are shown to be very sensitive to homophily, which, if prevalent, can lead to a collapse of their overall contribution. In such cases, however, we also find that obstinate cooperative behavior by a few poor may largely compensate for homophilic behavior.
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Project description:We show that genetic endowments linked to educational attainment strongly and robustly predict wealth at retirement. The estimated relationship is not fully explained by flexibly controlling for education and labor income. We therefore investigate a host of additional mechanisms that could account for the gene-wealth gradient, including inheritances, mortality, risk preferences, portfolio decisions, beliefs about the probabilities of macroeconomic events, and planning horizons. We provide evidence that genetic endowments related to human capital accumulation are associated with wealth not only through educational attainment and labor income, but also through a facility with complex financial decision-making.
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Project description:Liz, Mary, and Howard are three teenagers in the 1980s. Although unrelated, their families have much in common: stable two- parent households, at least one parent completed high school (though none of them went to college), and all three are white. They differ in one important aspect: their parents command quite different levels of wealth (here measured as net worth, that is, the total sum of financial and real assets minus debt). Liz's parents own less than $700 (inflation adjusted to 2013 dollars), meaning that Liz grows up at the bottom of the wealth distribution. Still, she is far from living in poverty thanks to her parents' annual income of about $50,000. Mary's parents have a somewhat higher income, about $70,000, but also markedly more wealth than Liz's parents: their net worth of roughly $60,000 puts them at about the national median of the time. Also unlike Liz's parents, they are homeowners. Howard is lucky enough to grow up in affluence. Not in terms of income, given that his parents have a household income of only about $40,000, but they have considerable wealth. With a net worth of nearly a quarter million dollars, Howard's parents are in the top 20 percent of wealth holders. They, too, own their home.
| S-EPMC5560613 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The black-white gap in household wealth is large and well documented. Here, we visualize how this racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, we show that the disadvantage of black families is a consequence both of wealth inequality in prior generations and race differences in the transmission of wealth positions across generations: Black children both have less wealthy parents on average and are far more likely to be downwardly mobile in household wealth. By displaying intergenerational movements between parental and offspring wealth quintiles, we underline how intergenerational fluctuation coexists with the maintenance of a severely racialized wealth structure.
| S-EPMC6634987 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background and objectivesThere is significant evidence from large-scale, industrial and post-industrial societies that greater income and wealth inequality is negatively associated with both population health and increasing health inequalities. However, whether such relationships are inevitable and should be expected to impact the health of small-scale societies as they become more market-integrated is less clear.MethodologyHere, using mixed-effect models, we explore the relationship between health, wealth, wealth inequality and health inequalities in a small-scale foraging population from the Philippines, the Agta.ResultsAcross 11 camps, we find small to moderate degrees of wealth inequality (maximal Gini Coefficient 0.44) which is highest in the most permanent camps, where individuals engage more heavily in the formal market. However, in both adults (n = 161) and children (n = 215), we find little evidence that either wealth or wealth inequality associates with ill health, except for one measure of nutritional condition-red blood cell count.Conclusions and implicationsWe interpret these results in the light of high levels of cooperation among the Agta which may buffer against the detrimental effects of wealth inequality documented in industrial and post-industrial societies. We observe little intergenerational wealth transmission, highlighting the fluid nature of wealth, and thus wealth inequality, particularly in mobile communities. The deterioration of nutritional status, as indicated by red blood cell counts, requires further investigation before concluding the Agta's extensive cooperation networks may be beginning to breakdown in the face of increasing inequality.
| S-EPMC10237286 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Individuals vary in their access to resources, social connections and phenotypic traits, and a central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand how this variation arises and influences fitness. Parallel research on humans has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in material possessions, opportunity and health. Central to both fields of study is that unequal distribution of wealth is an important component of social structure that drives variation in relevant outcomes. Here, we advance a research framework and agenda for studying wealth inequality within an ecological and evolutionary context. This ecology of inequality approach presents the opportunity to reintegrate key evolutionary concepts as different dimensions of the link between wealth and fitness by (i) developing measures of wealth and inequality as taxonomically broad features of societies, (ii) considering how feedback loops link inequality to individual and societal outcomes, (iii) exploring the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of what makes some societies more unequal than others, and (iv) studying the long-term dynamics of inequality as a central component of social evolution. We hope that this framework will facilitate a cohesive understanding of inequality as a widespread biological phenomenon and clarify the role of social systems as central to evolutionary biology.
| S-EPMC9065979 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionHealth-income inequality has been the focus of many studies. The relationship between economic conditions and health has also been widely studied. However, not much is known about how changes in aggregate economic conditions relate to health-income inequality. Nevertheless, such knowledge would have both scientific and practical value as substantial public expenditures are used to decrease such inequalities and opportunities to do so may differ over the business cycle. For this reason we examine the effect of the Icelandic economic collapse in 2008 on health-income inequality.MethodsThe data used come from a health and lifestyle survey carried out by the Public Health Institute of Iceland in 2007 and 2009. A stratified random sample of 9,807 individuals 18-79 years old received questionnaires and a total of 42.1% answered in both years. As measures of health-income inequality, health-income concentration indices are calculated and decomposed into individual-level determinants. Self-assessed health is used as the health measure in the analyses, but three different measures of income are used: individual income, household income, and equivalized household income.ResultsIn both years there is evidence of health-income inequality favoring the better off. However, changes are apparent between years. For males health-income inequality increases after the crisis while it remains fairly stable for females or slightly decreases. The decomposition analyses show that income itself and disability constitute the most substantial determinants of inequality. The largest increases in contributions between years for males come from being a student, having low education and being obese, as well as age and income but those changes are sensitive to the income measure used.ConclusionsChanges in health and income over the business cycle can differ across socioeconomic strata, resulting in cyclicality of income-related health distributions. As substantial fiscal expenditures go to limiting the relationship between income and health, the business-cycle effect on equality, which has up until now not received much attention, needs to be considered.
| S-EPMC4119249 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How social inequality is described—as advantage or disadvantage—critically shapes individuals’ responses to it [e.g., B. S. Lowery, R. M. Chow, J. R. Crosby, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 45, 375–378, 2009]. As such, it is important to document how people, in fact, choose to describe inequality. In a corpus of 18,349 newspaper articles (study 1), in 764 hand-coded news media publications (study 2), and in a preregistered experiment of 566 lay participants (study 3), we document the presence of chronic frames of race, gender, and wealth inequality. Specifically, race and gender inequalities are more likely to be framed as subordinate groups’ disadvantages than as dominant groups’ advantages, and wealth inequality is more likely to be described with no frame (followed by dominant group advantage, then subordinate group disadvantage). Supplemental lexicon-based text analyses in studies 1 and 2, survey results in study 3, and a preregistered experiment (study 4; N = 578) provide evidence that the differences in chronic frames are related to the perceived legitimacy of the inequality, with race and gender inequalities perceived as less legitimate than wealth inequality. The presence of such chronic frames and their association with perceived legitimacy may be mechanisms underlying the systematic inattention to White individuals’ and men’s advantages, and the disadvantages of the working class.
| S-EPMC9173779 | biostudies-literature