Occupations and Earnings Inequality

A very belated plug for a blog entry by my former student Mark Williams, now at the LSE. He has done some fascinating work on occupations and the growth in earnings inequality. What he finds is that, in the UK at least, growing earnings inequality is predominantly a matter of the occupational averages growing further apart as opposed to growing heterogeneity within occupational groups. So much then for the neoclassical soup, that bitter acid that was going to dissolve all that nasty  rent seeking activity that lay behind the sociological categories of occupation and class.