Inequality

I have noted a few books, sites, and results that seem to be related to the Stanford course: 

Books

• An excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster, 2011).
  
  
•  The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and
  Why Liberals Should Too -- James Galbraith (Author)
   
• The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger [Paperback]
  Kate Pickett (Author), Richard Wilkinson (Author)   

Graphs, and Sites

What Americans think about income inequality in one graph -- If Americans don't think that there is a wide spread in the income distribution, then they probably will  not vote to change it.

Mahalanobis -- The incomes of the top 3% are distributed according to Pareto's law, (20/80 law) where as the lowest 97% are distributed according to the distribution of energy in gas, e.g. Boltzmann-Gibbs. (Original article, " Why it is hard to share the wealth, 12 March 2005" New Scientist) -- I think that this means 2 things:

• There is a difference between the way income is distributed amoung the rich and the poor, at somewhere around the 3% point. e.g. Adjusted Gross income of ~ $100,000
• The poor's income is distributed randomly e.g. as though in any interchange where as the rich'd income is distributed as though in an interchange the richer one was the more benefit one got from the interchange.

And here is one of the papers "Pareto's Law of Income Distribution: Evidence for Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States" --  that shows that the Incomes of the countries are roughly Power Law distributed.

The Gini as a "function" of Democratic score, I realize that this is just one plot, but it sure does NOT indicate a strong correlation...