Has U.S. Income Inequality Really Increased?

There are frequent complaints that U.S. income inequality has increased in recent decades. Estimates of rising inequality that are widely cited in the media are often based on federal income tax return data. Those data appear to show that the share of U.S. income going to the top 1 percent (those people with the highest incomes) has increased substantially since the 1970s.However, there have been large changes in U.S. tax rules over time that have made a dramatic difference on what is reported as income on individual tax returns. Tax changes induced thousands of businesses to switch from filing under the corporate tax system to filing under the individual tax system. Corporate executives switched from accepting stock options taxed as capital gains to nonqualified stock options taxed as salaries. The huge growth in tax-favored savings plans, such as 401(k)s, has resulted in billions of dollars of investment income disappearing from tax returns. Meanwhile, studies of inequality that are based on tax return data usually exclude transfer payments, which results in exaggerating the shares of income received by those at the top by ignoring growing amounts of income at the bottom.Measurements of inequality have also been affected by large reductions in income tax rates, particularly in 1986. Estimates by many economists indicate that the reported income of highincome taxpayers is very responsive to tax rates. When top tax rates on wages or capital gains fall, reported incomes rise, and a larger fraction of the incomes of those at the top show up on tax returns. International comparisons show that reported income shares of those at the top have risen the most where top tax rates have been cut the most (the United States, the United Kingdom, and India) and have risen the least where top tax rates have remained very high (France and Japan).In sum, studies based on tax return data provide highly misleading comparisons of changes to the U.S. income distribution because of dramatic changes in tax rules and tax reporting in recent decades. Aside from stock option windfalls during the late-1990s stock-market boom, there is little evidence of a significant or sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth over the past 20 years

Mark Eli Kalderon, "Sympathy in Perception"

Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been the way that understanding perception merely as registering the presence of things might seem to leave us vulnerable to error about the nature of what is presented. Kalderon seeks to remedy this not by dealing at length with various disjunctivist positions concerning perception which may be friendly to his position, nor by spending much time criticising opposing views, but by explicating presentationalist perception through a series of tactile metaphors, thereby providing a radically new philosophical view. He claims that we do not just 'stand before' reality, we grasp it-the metaphor survives tellingly in ordinary language-and he thereby seeks to defend a form of realism which is robust, though he admits, "pre-modern". He draws on a remarkably rich variety of thinkers to defend this position, including pre-modern, modern, and various figures from both analytic and continental philosophy-however, although there is plenty of solid scholarship here, the book is aimed at metaphysics more than the history of ideas

Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-

White Counselor Trainees\u27 Racial Identity and Working Alliance Perceptions

Racial identity has been theorized to significantly affect cross-racial counseling relationships (Helms, 1984, 1995). This study examined the direct impact of White racial identity of 124 counselor trainees on working alliance formation in a same-racial and cross-racial vicarious counseling analogue. Regardless of the race of the client, disintegration and reintegration attitudes negatively affected working alliance ratings, and pseudoindependent and autonomy attitudes positively affected working alliance ratings. Implications for counseling, supervision, training, and research are discussed

White Counselor Trainees\u27 Racial Identity and Working Alliance Perceptions

Racial identity has been theorized to significantly affect cross-racial counseling relationships (Helms, 1984, 1995). This study examined the direct impact of White racial identity of 124 counselor trainees on working alliance formation in a same-racial and cross-racial vicarious counseling analogue. Regardless of the race of the client, disintegration and reintegration attitudes negatively affected working alliance ratings, and pseudoindependent and autonomy attitudes positively affected working alliance ratings. Implications for counseling, supervision, training, and research are discussed

Effects of liquid swine manure and its components on Heterodera glycines population densities and soybean growth and yield

The effects of application of swine manure and a comparable rate of inorganic fertilizer to corn on soybean cyst nematode, Heterodera glycines, population densities and soybean growth and yield the following year were studied in two two-year corn and soybean rotations. Soybean heights and yields were increased by manure and inorganic fertilizer that were applied the previous year in corn. Heterodera glycines egg population densities were reduced 48 to 64% in the two experiments after a year of corn. Egg population densities at corn harvest in both experiments were the same where manure or fertilizer was applied and in the untreated, planted control. Nutrient source and whether corn was or was not planted the first year had no influence on H. glycines egg population densities after soybean harvest the second year;In another set of four experiments, the effects of application of swine manure and inorganic fertilizer to soil prior to planting soybeans were evaluated. Both nutrient treatments reduced soybean plant population densities in three experiments and increased plant heights in all four experiments. Manure use increased or had no effect on soybean yield when compared to the untreated checks, but inorganic fertilizer reduced soybean yield in one experiment. H. glycines egg population densities in the soil at soybean harvest were either not different from or were greater than egg population densities in the untreated checks;In laboratory experiments, Heterodera glycines egg hatch was irreversibly inhibited when eggs were incubated in liquid swine manure and in deionized water exposed to vapors from manure. Hatch was inhibited when eggs were incubated in several components of manure, including the ionic salt components, volatile organic acids and aromatic organic compounds, and ammonium nitrate. Hatch inhibition by ammonium nitrate was reversible whereas hatch inhibition with the other compounds was irreversible. Indole vapors stimulated egg hatch. Another laboratory hatch study showed that leachate collected from soil amended with manure inhibited egg hatch relative to hatch in deionized water. Leachate from unamended soil stimulated egg hatch relative to hatch in deionized water. Egg hatch was reduced by contact with soil amended with manure and by volatiles from soil amended with manure