Report: 110 people own 35% of Russia's wealth

Re:Report: 110 people own 35% of Russia's wealth by mrcactu5 on Thursday October 10, 2013 @09:42AM (#6527581)

  What is happening in the Western world (rise of inequality   
  due to skills being prized higher owing to technological 
  change) is very different to what happened in Russia.

We are currently in a period of technological change and - as we see on HackerNews everyday - skills are being prized. Ostensibly we are supposed to be helping the economy. Now it sounds like we're making income inequality worse since we know things that other people don't.

I had no idea what to Google for more information but I found this outdated paper from 1998 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics http://economics.mit.edu/files/3809 We get supply-demand analysis like

  the unprecedented increase in the supply of college   
  graduates during the 1970s may have been causal for both 
  technological developments and the changes in the 
  structures of wages in the past two decades

That paper was written in 1998, I wonder if there's more recent discussion on relationship between valuation of skills and wealth inequality.

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Re:Report: 110 people own 35% of Russia's wealth by mseebach on Thursday October 10, 2013 @09:50AM (#6527625)

Reducing equality is not the only measure for helping the economy. Software driven automation has made enormous sections of the economy more productive and there's plenty more to do.

But yes, as comfortable middle class jobs are largely automated away, inequality increases. "Average is over" by Tyler Cowen is largely about this shift. It's not a particularly comfortable read, but I struggle to fault his analysis.

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