On September 13, 2016, Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic:
Wealth at the top of the income distribution is skyrocketing, leading to growing inequality. This trend is especially pronounced in the United States. But much of the leading research on the topic isn’t coming from American economists.
… “In general, the [American] economics profession has avoided the subject of class conflict. All issues of distribution have been regarded as less pertinent than ideas of growth,” Arthur Goldhammer, a senior affiliate at Harvard’s Center for European Studies who studies French and American politics and history, told me. “Distributive questions in economics just raise hostility, and ultimately, growth is the important issue.”
… It may not be surprising, then, that in a 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives dedicated to income inequality and the top 1 percent, it was Atkinson, Saez, Piketty, and Facundo Alvaredo of the Paris School of Economics whoauthored a paper on how the share of wealth going to the top has skyrocketed in America but not in European countries, while it was an American economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, who published a paper called simply “Defending the One Percent.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/why-so-few-american-economists-are-studying-inequality/499253/
