OgO

2024-08-24 | The Great Separation is there

It’s there ! https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731603 . With a little work (9 years), some data points (1 billion +) from a handful of OECD countries (12) during a couple of years (30) and a few coauthors 1/n

(28: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, István Boza, Lasse Folke Henriksen, Are Skeie Hermansen, Feng Hou, Jiwook Jung, Naomi Kodama, Alena Křížková, Zoltán Lippényi, Silvia Maja Melzer, Eunmi Mun, Halil Sabanci , Max Thaning, ... 2/n

Paula Apascaritei, Dustin Avent-Holt, Nina Bandelj, Alexis Baudour, David Cort, Marta M. Elvira, Gergely Hajdu, Aleksandra Kanjuo-Mrčela, Joseph King, Andrew Penner, Trond Petersen, Andreja Poje, Anthony Rainey, Mirna Safi, and Matthew Soener) 3/n

This long article could be summarized as follows :
Top earners work together more and more. Period. 4/n

How do we know this? We use linked employer-employee administrative (often) exhaustive data and measure who works with whom in the same workplace. A growing share of the coworkers of a country top (1 & 10%) earners’ belongs to the same earnings group.
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https://cdn.masto.host/sciencessocial/media_attachments/files/113/017/420/275/585/579/original/0029e822decefa54.png

For example, between 1993 & 2019, the share of coworkers of France’s top 1% belonging to the same earnings group increased from 9 to 16%. In a magical world where they were randomly distributed, this share would remain flat and low at 1%. 6/n

This process of earnings segregation is taking place mainly at the top of the earnings distribution. It is more dynamic than the evolution of workplace segregation by gender, nativity, or age. The rate of increase of earnings segregation even beats that of top wage shares. 7/n

Where does this come from? We identify three intertwined socioeconomic factors that contribute to this trend: deindustriatization, shrinking and organizational restructuring of workplace, and digitalization. 8/n

For one country, France, we could even show that restructuring shocks such as outsourcing, layoffs, offshoring and subcontracting contribute to top earner segregation. 9/n

https://cdn.masto.host/sciencessocial/media_attachments/files/113/017/423/561/836/113/original/e12e77fba89e4f2d.png

This increase in segregation is hardly noticeable from one year to the next. But over a 30-year period, it changes the society in which we work and live, its social cohesion, its circulation of information, its structure of opportunities. 10/n

At the bottom of the earnings hierarchy, it could eventually fuel the feeling of being left behind. 11/n

Aggregate data for partial replication can be found here :

http://olivier.godechot.free.fr/hoparticle.php?id_art=824
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