I see that on Monday, Peter Orszag did a blog post about Bates Medal winner Emmanuel Saez’s work and its policy implications:

Emmanuel’s work on income inequality has helped to point the way for the Administration in its pledge to rebalance the tax code, with a tax cut going to 95 percent of working Americans while asking those at the very top to contribute more. The inequality that has arisen over the past three decades is not going to go away overnight, and it has been driven by many factors—including a decline in the growth rate of college-educated workers. But where the prior administration used changes in the tax code to exacerbate these trends, this Administration thinks that the tax code should be used to mitigate them because an economy in which all can enjoy success is one that is strong for us all.

Good stuff. In the long run, I expect Saez’s work on taxes and elasticity to prove even more influential, as I think it lays out the rationale for an approach to tax reform that could raise a ton of revenue in a progressive manner at a low economic cost.

The John Bates Clark medal goes out to a promising young economist who often later finds himself burdened with a Nobel Prize. This year’s winner is Emmanuel Saez which is exciting for policy-oriented progressive bloggers since his specialty is inequality.

You would think that such an award-winning economist could find a computer program that makes pretty charts than this, but here’s the key portrait of growing inequality in the United States from his “Striking it Rich: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States”:

The ongoing crash will, one assumes, push the top one percent share down again. These imagines at least suggest the existence of a connection between sustainable economic growth and broadly shared economic growth.