Recommended reading
I spotted a couple of smart economic pieces over the weekend.
My colleague, David Robinson, had a business column Sunday that examined the latest study from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The good news was that per-capita income in the region rose by 6.2 percent last year. Other numbers weren't so good, as Dave explained.
"Our technology sector is tiny, an even less significant source of income locally than it was in 2001, accounting for just 1.5 percent of local income — a little more than half the ratio nationally."
And.
"Where we really stand out against the rest of the country is in the level of transfer payments we collect. Those payments, which range from pensions and Social Security to welfare benefits, account for a little more than 20 percent of our total income, compared with less than 15 percent nationally."
This, on top of a ditty Matt Spina reported a couple of weeks ago: the city has more households with annual incomes under $5,000 than over $50,000. That's a staggering statistic.
Also worth reading is a piece from the Sunday magazine of The New York Times that looked at the growing income gap between the rich and the rest of us. Here's what Larry Bartels, a professor of politics at Princeton University, had to say:
"The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House."
Hmmmm.
