here .

There's quite a variety. Many from libertarians and some from liberals....like Matt Yglesias.

See that link plus Wilkinson's response here .

Lindsey then responded...again courtesy of Will with more comments.

This website has massive tables on the distribution of income and taxes between 1979 and 2002.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=6133

Views it from all types of angles (e.g. pre-tax income, post-tax income, proportion of income taken by taxes, sources of tax, total tax contributions, etc.)

I didn't see anything about marginal tax rates. For that, try this:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/federalindividualratehistory-20080107...

This quote represents one of my favorite examples intellecutal jujitsu:

Interestingly, although the large influx of
unskilled immigrants has made American
inequality statistics look worse, it has actually
reduced inequality for the people involved.
After all, immigrants experience large wage
gains as a result of relocating to the United
States, thereby reducing the wage gap between
them and top earners in this country. According
to Lerman, if trends in inequality are recalculated
to include, at the beginning of the period,
recent immigrants and their native-country
wages, a very different picture emerges. Instead
of the 90/10 wage ratio increasing by 16.6 percent
between 1979 and 1996, it actually fell by
4.7 percent. Thus, the result of immigration has
been to reduce human inequality while increasing
national inequality.82

When explaining the rapid growth of the post-war American economy (reprinted below). Lindsey leaves out one of my favorite explanations -- the destruction of the foreign industrial base during WWII, leaving the USA without competition in foreign and domestic markets. This view is based on the observation that the USA's total industrial dominance started after WWII and ended during the 1970s as other industrial countries (notably, Germany and Japan) had rebuilt and provided competition.

Around the same time, I think we became more reliant on imports of raw materials (especially oil), so this international competition would have hit us even if we tried to keep our domestic markets closed off.

Does anyone know of studies on these points?

... several factors were
especially conducive to strong performance
at that time. There was a pent-up demand for
goods and services after the privations of the
Great Depression and the mobilization of
World War II. There was also a pent-up sup-
ply of new products that couldn’t be brought
to market during the depression and war
years. That pent-up supply was augmented
by technological and organizational breakthroughs
accelerated by the imperatives of
total war. Big advances in transportation,
communications, and air conditioning stimulated
catch-up growth in the underdeveloped
South and underpopulated West. And
rapid upgrades in human capital (first explosive
growth in high school graduates, then
explosive growth in college graduates) doubtless
helped to spur productivity gains.

DeLong describes a "breach of trust" that occurred as a result of financial innovations of the 1980's:

The second interpretation is one that has been pushed by Larry Summers and Andrei Shleifer. It notes that organizations run on patterns of long-term trust and confidence, and that it is devastating to an organization's effectiveness for those at the top to break the established implicit long-run bargains that the organization runs on. Under this interpretation, the paternalistic-employer-and-civic-booster model of the American corporation that dominated the first post-WWII decades was an effective and efficient system of corporate organization. Come the hostile takeover, however, the corporate raiders can replace the old management that had made and kept the implicit long-run bargains with new managers who have no attachment to them, and are willing to do the bidding of the shareholders and the takeover artists. This "breach of trust" moves us to a system of corporate organization that is less efficient and effective for society as a whole--workers who don't trust their bosses won't spend time learning things that are important if you work for this particular company but not in the larger job market, firms won't invest in the community in an attempt to make it a place where workers would like to stay, et cetera. But this new form does expropriate a lot of the value of the firm that was shared with workers-as-stakeholders, and transfer the value to the bosses and the shareholders.

This coincides with Lindey's description of the "end of the Organization Man", which he attributed to a general (and presumably homogeneous) cultural shift towards individualism. I think Lindsey failed to consider the class structure of such a shift: what portions of society embraced individualism first, and who had the power to change institutions to reflect their own cultural attitudes?

I think there is reason to believe that the shift away from the organization man and towards individualism occurred primarily in the upper classes, and was basically forced upon an unprepared working class--resulting in a shift of wealth upwards.

I say this occurred in the upper classes for a few reasons:

1) The "conventional wisdom" on this issue focuses on middle-class college students as the source of the individualistic attitudes of the 1960s. At least, they were the most vocal.

2) Lindesy himself suggested that conformism is the result of insecurity, while individualism is the result of security (including economic security). If that is the case, then individualism would clearly take hold among the middle and upper classes before the lower classes.

3) I still see this difference in attitudes today (as an academic scientist in Pittsburgh). While most scientists come from middle-class backgrounds and embrace the uncertainty and independence of research, I've seen people from lower class backgrounds who have a lot of trouble with this lack of structure. When discussing values (both for personal and economic relationships), the "working class" people (at work and in the city at large) tend to focus on loyalty and stability -- they often want a definite connection between effort and reward, which can only be guaranteed by a cartel. This is quite different from the "professionals" who are happy to take risks in the interest of possibly achieving big things (while also being confident of not being turned out on the street if the gamble doesn't pay off).

We can also ask whether "free agency" also has a class bias: it is much easier to move to a different city for a better job if your salary enables you to fly home on a regular basis, or if your friends and family tend to be scattered around the country already. Again, we can ask whether this "individualism" was a society-wide phenomenon, or whether it is just an example of the powerful people taking care of themselves while abandoning the people that they have power over.

Finally, we can ask how long the bosses can preach (and live) an ideal of individualism and still find good help? There is still the notion in our society that workers owe loyalty to their employers -- that they should do their best to complete their assignments, and in general should be thankful that they've been "given a job".

What happens if workers abandon this sense of obligation, and start looking out for themselves?

This is what Kevin Carson suggests that they do.

So maybe this period of income inequality is simply the result of the fact that workers have yet to embrace the selfishness that has already consumed their bosses.

From Lindsey:

How to explain
the rise of so-called “superstar” markets? One
explanation goes back to technology: people
will pay top dollar to see the very best performers;
and as technology (e.g., television,
the Internet) expands the audience that those
performers can reach, top performers profit
accordingly.28 But in other cases (e.g., chief
executive officers, investment bankers, elite
lawyers), big increases in remuneration have
come without any corresponding expansion
of the “audience” or customer base.

...

Is there any evidence
that changes in policy and social norms have
contributed to the rise of “winner-take-all” or
“superstar” markets?

Yes. First, the government has gone out of its way to expand the markets available to capital managers and copyright owners. In particular, I think of agreements like NAFTA, which only reduced tarriffs on manufactured goods if the other country expanded their protections for capitalist institutions like intellectual property and absentee ownership. In other words, these agreements increased competition for the working class while increasing opportunities for the owners and managers.... with American consumers being merely a bargaining chip.

The Federal government also goes to great lengths to homogenize the domestic market, increasing the opportunities for company managers and copyright producers. This comes in the form of homogenizing state commercial regulations, and also subsidizing the deployment of transportation and communication infrastructure (which admittedly is not a new policy).

Finally, if we just focus on the superstar entertainers (copyright producers), take note that the government extended the duration of copyright in 1962, 1976, and 1998-- the last extension was 1909. These extensions were made even as the audience for copyrighted work was expanding massively -- through increased population, increased income per capita, and international agreements securing protection for American copyrights. If anything, copyright terms (a government policy) should have been decreasing during that period, those other trends would have been sufficient to propel the production of new works.

Similarly, the anti-trust exemption given to professional sports (along with local subsidies) probably contributes a bit to the extreme incomes of these atheletes.

that is related to the premises of Nostalgianomics.

Living Wage by Megan McArdle:

In the popular mind, every blue collar worker in 1950 was pulling down a hefty wage at GM, but union membership peaked at about a third of workers, and most of those jobs were at companies that didn't have the profits, or the freedom from competition, to support those kinds of wages. A lot more blue collar workers were people like the mechanics and pump operators at my grandfather's gas station, who raised families on . . . the kind of money you could generate working at a gas station.

Our memories are distorted by two things: first, the tendency of all cultures to focus on their own outliers (many fewer people work for silicon valley startups in real life than in either our entertainment, or the popular imagination), and second, the fact that the people who have written about the period are abnormally likely to have come from successful families who pushed them through an education. Their memory of a well-appointed blue-collar childhood in a nice suburb on Dad's generous steelworker wages endures; few memories of a straggling blue-collar childhood as the child of a factory janitor do, because those kids were less likely to go to college and become people of letters. The successful and educated are disproportionately likely to be represented in all parts of our written and spoken culture, from man on the street interviews to letters to the editor. History really is written by the winners.