Economics And Values
Mainstream economics is largely built on theories that assume that people are best understood as highly competitive and individualistic maximizing agents. In fact, capitalism is said to be the most...
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Low-Wage Employment Recovery
The media has focused on the lack of jobs as a major election issue. But the concern needs to go beyond jobs to the quality of those jobs. As a report by the National Employment Law Project makes...
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The Continuing Relevance of Class
Politicians always seem to be talking about the middle class. They need some new focus groups. According to the Pew Research Center, over the past four years the percentage of adult Americans that...
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Owning The Economy
The stock market looms large in our understanding of the economy. The business news is often little more than a report on the movement of the market. High school economics classes often introduce the...
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The Case For Raising Taxes
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s low federal tax rate—14.1%—has called attention to the fact that our tax code favors people who make their money from investments rather than labor. According to...
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We Need More Worker Power
The good economic news, which got plenty of attention, is that the U.S. economy added over 170,000 new jobs in October. The largely unreported negative news is that average real hourly wages in the...
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The Social Safety Net Under Attack
One of the subthemes of current discussions about how best to reduce our national debt is that we must reign in out-of-control spending on federal safety net programs. The reality is quite different....
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Who Is For Change?
Many expected that the severity of the Great Recession, recognition that the prior expansion was largely based on unsustainable bubbles, and an anemic post-crisis recovery, would lead to serious...
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Beyond Growth
While newspapers give a lot of ink to arguments about whether reducing the budget deficit will boost or reduce growth, they seem to have little interest in the related issue of whether economic growth...
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Profits And The Economy
The economist Ed Dolan sums up the current state of the U.S. economy in a recent blog post with the following headline: “Latest US GDP data show economy weak at year’s end but corporate profits near...
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The Wealth of Nations
Wealth data is not easy to get. Still for three years now, Credit Suisse Research Institute has published an annual Global Wealth Databook which attempts to estimate global wealth holdings. The most...
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Globalization And Inequality
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recently examined the causes of rising inequality in developing and developed countries. In what follows I discuss its analysis of the...
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An Economy For The 1%
The following table reveals much about the way our economic system operates. It shows that the top 1% captured 68% of all the new income generated over the period 1993 to 2012. Now that is a long time...
View ArticleFighting Inequality
The following post by the economist Michael Taft appeared in the Irish Left Review. Although Taft is addressing an Irish audience, I think his discussion of Swiss initiatives against inequality...
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Worries About Inequality
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about income inequality. What follows is a chart from the article which shows that average income for the bottom 90% of families actually fell by over...
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Increase The Minimum Wage
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Several states mandate a higher minimum wage; the state of Washington has the highest, at $9.19. President Obama recently voiced his support for efforts to...
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Global Wealth Inequality
This look at global wealth inequality comes from Credit Suisse’s 2013 global wealth report. On the left side of the triangle we can see the division of all adults in the world into four groups based on...
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Dismal Trends
Officially our most recent recession began December 2007 and ended June 2009. The following chart provides an important perspective on the recovery period. Stocks and profits have enjoyed a remarkable...
View ArticleThe Free Trade Myth
The US government, on behalf of our largest corporations, continues to push for approval of the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TPP), a new “so-called” free trade agreement. It is striking how...
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Capitalism And Inequality
Thomas Piketty is an expert on income inequality. He and Emmanuel Saez have produced some of the best work measuring its explosive growth. Piketty has just published a massive new book on the subject...
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