The paper criticizes the conception of value on behalf of the conventional economic theory, blaming it for the current economic school’s incapacity to explain the actual economic crisis and to offer an adequate perspective to settle a solution. It proposes an explanation based on the tendency...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the presence of economic inequality may lead to erosions of economic freedom. Using Economic Freedom of the World as a measure of free economic institutions, it finds that a one standard deviation increase in the gini coefficient reduces the presence of free...

COVID-19 has been a tragedy for California. More than 4 million Californians have contracted the disease, and over 64,000 have died from it. And beyond the cost of illness and death, the pandemic and the state’s actions to contain it have devastated California’s economy. Low-income and...

What makes the rich different? Are they more productive, as mainstream economists claim? I offer another explanation. What makes the rich different, I propose, is hierarchical power. The rich command hierarchies. The poor do not. It is this greater control over subordinates, I hypothesize, that...

This paper investigates a new approach to understanding personal and functional income distribution. I propose that hierarchical power - the command of subordinates in a hierarchy - is what distinguishes the rich from the poor and capitalists from workers. Specifically, I hypothesize that...

Distributive value judgments based on the 'origins' of economic inequalities (e.g. circumstances and responsible choices) are increasingly evoked to argue that 'the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal'. However, one may reasonably agree that distributive value...

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

Following a methodology proposed by Jantzen and Volpert (2012), we use IRS Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) data for the United States (1921-2012) to estimate two Gini-like indices representing inequality at the bottom and the top of the income distribution. We also calculate the overall Gini index...