REVIEW: 'The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate' by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early
There's an entire genre of "things are better than you think" books, stretching back at least a couple decades. In these sunny tomes, academics push back against pessimistic claims that, for example, middle-class incomes are stagnant, the poor are getting poorer, and inequality is exploding thanks to the gains of the evil top 1 percent. Think It's Getting Better All the Time from Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon; Myths of Rich and Poor from W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm; Factfulness from Hans Rosling; Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker; and The American Dream Is Not Dead from Michael Strain.
Joining them is The Myth of American Inequality from former senator Phil Gramm and coauthors Robert Ekelund and John Early, all three of them economists. The U.S. government is getting key concepts all wrong, they say, including income, inflation, poverty, and inequality. They detail how some often-cited metrics are calculated—and how various corrections change the numbers.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Washington Free Beacon