The average goal difference in all games so far (not counting overtime and PKs) is 1.54 goals. As one would expect with 48 teams (and greater team quality differences) this is higher than in 2022 (1.41) and 2018 (1. 28).

As usual, Europe dominates the quartter-finals.

The mother of all inequality disputes. (All data are in PPPs and on per capita basis; all measures are in Ginis.) Unweighted international inequality (aka Concept 1 ineq) is inequality of all countries' GDPs per capita (as simple as that). It has been going down, but slowly, over the past 30y,

Graph from Chapter 1 of "The Great Global Transformation" Within the United States, the growth rate for all parts of the population (but the very top) was higher in the period 1964-79 than in the period 1979-2019 (blue line above the red).

(owners of the means of production, i.e. petty commodity production) or of state-management bureaucracy. Or of both. Finally, they disagree on whether class relations under socialism are antagonistic or not.

People in the global top 5% are overwhelmingly American and more recently Chinese too. In fact, US and Chinese citizens account for almost one-half of all people in the global top 5% (37+10=47).

In preparation for the discussion next Wed on Yugo econ theory 1950-90, and trying represent the main cleavages among participants I drew this simplified picture to show why Yugoslav self-management literature was fairly different from literature on the seemingly same topic in the West.

Picture shows the estimate of Gini that includes most of today's Western Europe, the Levant, Aegean, and North Africa. Inequality declined significantly between 14 and 700 as mean income plummeted. But even in the first century, Gini was around 40, much lower level than over the same area today.

Continuing with my capsule film reviews. I did not think one could make a movie out of "L'etranger". But I was totally wrong. Ozon's "L'etranger" is a splendid film, hewing very closely to the book with first-rate acting, scenery, and the picture of the lost world of French Algeria

EU27 income convergence of which I wrote in my latest Substack is visible also in National Accounts statistics, not only in income surveys. The graph below shows it for Concept 2 inequality (population-weighted average incomes for 27 countries).

Non plus ultra.

I remember w what dignity Zidane left the field (the "hottest" field in football, the World Cup final) after being insulted by Materazzi. He butted him (as Materazzi deserved) & then in full pride & dignity and with no complaint--actually with not a single word--Zizou just left the field. Greatness!

More on China's growth slowdown. Yes, it is sharper than the world average (expected from the relationship ntw income level & growth for 100+ countries between 1950 and today)--but its acceleration was also way above the expected. And China current growth path is still above than the world average.

To see that, compare it with an actual dramatic slowdown. That of Japan. Note not only the downward sloping line but the clustering of yearly growth rate at zero or almost zero, at the value of 10.5 on the horizontal axis, meaning about $36-37,000.

Or differently, each dot represents Chinese actual growth of GDP per capita at a given level of GDP per capita. The line is a non-parametric regression. There is obviously a slowdown but it does not seem dramatic.

China's slowdown in historical perspective. The thick line shows estimated rate of GDPpc growth at different levels of GDP per capita, going back to 1950, and using more than 10,000 observations. The dot shows where China's today's (more exactly, 2024) growth rate and GDPpc are.

Year 2020 was a great equalizer in America. Afterwards, things went back to where they were before, and will probably in the next few years get "worse" (i.e. inequality may go up). But here is the growth incidence curve for real per capita income 2019-20.

If you take micro @lisdata for 25 Western economies, convert income for all households into the same currency (PPP dollars), express that currency in real terms and thus treat the entire group as a single country, you get the following Growth Incidence Curve for the period 2018-2023.

In both cases, a public good is an object of sales. One of the arguments made in "The Great Global Transformation." The difference is that in one case country can reject a person's demand for citizenship with no cost to itself, while in the other case it faces high tariffs or war.

Quarterly Newsletter - Stone Center (CUNY) on Socio-Economic Inequality t.co/lcBLMSWMMG

You can preorder the US edition of "The Great Global Transformation"--coming out on March 7. The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order: Milanovic, Branko: 9780226846415: amazon.com: Books

They also wrote a biography of Andropov and super interesting book contrasting Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, both of whom they knew very well.

but EU's problem may rather be that it is literally dying off, and consequently its worldwide importance measured by total GDP drops both because on the per capita basis it is stagnating, and on population basis it is steadily falling.

Not much of a difference in the pattern of relative decline,

Studies that claimed to deal w/ income distribution were in effect what I call "incidental studies of income distribution". They belonged to trade or labor economics but not to income distribution. They fundamentally misunderstood why we study inequality.

One such example is Alan Blinder's "Towards an economic theory of income distribution".

The most that neoclassical economics ever did in inequality studies was mere empiricism. Nothing else. No integrative study of inequality, no theories of how inequality is determined nor how it would evolve. It was in true sense what Marx called "vulgar political economy".

The end of a long period of decreasing global inequality? Concept 3 is Gini between world citizens calculated from some 110+ representative national household surveys with incomes of individuals expressed in PPP dollars.

Italy crossed *back* into the 2 territory in 2008; it went down to barely above 2 in year 2020. It is now at 2.14, the relative (to the world) ratio where it was in 1958. It charts a nice inverted U. Italy's story is replicated by almost all W European countries.

Happy 2026! Two most beautiful places in the world. And they need to be seen at night because only at night they show their true greatness.