How tall are you?

What if you could imagine your income being proportional to your height.  How tall would you be in comparison to others as you take a walk?  Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with just such an idea to look at income inequality.

You are on your walk when the first passers-by are the owners of loss-making businesses - - they are invisible, their head below the ground.  Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets.  After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America's median income is only half the mean (think about that and picture the normal distribution that produces such a thing).  It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear.  But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by.  With six minutes to go on your walk, 12 foot tall people start to appear.  When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall (Note: The attached graphic is from 2006 - - you can see what four years has meant to the tallest among us - - four really bad economic years).

Engineers are not on their bellies chipping away at the coalface of life.  We are above average in height.  But engineers need to be highly concerned with rising income inequality.  By most measures - - the more unequal societies become the worse they do according to almost every quality-of-life indicator.  Inequality has negative social consequences and it perverts politics.  In the United States, income inequality began to widen in the 1980s largely because the poor fell behind those in the middle.  More recently, the shift has been overwhelmingly due to a rise in the share of income going to the very top - - the "Two Mile Club" - - particularly those working in the financial sector.

Globalization and technology are twin sources of the inequality.  A global market offers bigger returns to those at the top of their game - - authors and hedge fund managers are in this boat.  Modern technology favors the skilled and educated - - your height is proportional to your brain.  Some of the inequality is purely social - - educated men and women tend to marry one another.

Some of this is obviously performance and pay as part of a meritocratic process.  Some of this is just plain old rigging of rules and institutions.  The risk for democratic societies is the potential backlash among the "rule playing and educated" when they see wider inequality and fewer rungs in the ladder and lower growth because of rigged rules and subsides that favor specific industries and specific global elites.

Pay attention to your height as you walk around your city and community.