I show you the money

A reader asked me not to write about ?useless topics? such as summer book recommendations, the relationship between democracy and growth and the economics of weed or love- and ?show him the money? instead. As your friendly neighborhood economist, I am happy to oblige.

But if you are expecting me to tell you where the lira-dollar exchange rate is headed, you?ll be utterly disappointed. While economic fundamentals warrant a weaker lira in the medium-term, as I explained in my June 1 column, it is impossible to forecast currencies, and, more generally, asset prices, in the short run.

I could instead offer more general advice like getting a top-notch education or choosing a profitable profession, but those would not be of much use to many of you who have already made those decisions. Besides, those are probably not your best bets to becoming rich anyway. But it turns out that there is a much safer way of making a decent living: Residing in a rich country.

Branko Milanovic from the University of Maryland notes in his recent paper, ?Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live??, that the richest in India reach only the level of the lower middle class in the U.S., where the poorest are at the level of the median income in China. You would argue that many goods are cheaper in poor countries, but Milanovic takes that into account by using purchasing power parity-adjusted per capita incomes.

He then estimates, using data from the World Income Distribution database for 123 countries, the effect of country and parental circumstances on one?s income. The latter is also important, given the significance attributed to the decline in income mobility by French economist Thomas Piketty in his bestseller ...