The Greater Recession: America Suffers from a Crisis of Productivity - Derek Thompson - Business In fact, real wages for middle class men have declined by 28 percent since 1969, according to a report from the Hamilton Project. For men without a high school degree, they've fallen by a whopping 66 percent. "Stagnation is too weak a word," said Michael Greenstone, author of the report. "This is decline." "The decline in earnings shakes the core of the American Dream." Economists got it wrong, Greenstone said, because they compared wages among all working men rather than among all "working-age" men. "This decline in the earnings opportunities for men has had profound influences on American society," Greenstone said. This finding has deep implications. ALL ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY(or: If We're Working Less, Who's Working More?) Americans have a complicated relationship with productivity. Don't ask David Allen to explain this. We know where the jobs are going -- to machines, software, and foreign workers. What's so bad about 1950s wages, anyway? Poverty is overrated. It doesn't end there.
Paying Nothing, Conservative Style By Matthew Yglesias on October 11, 2011 at 4:44 pm "Paying Nothing, Conservative Style" Here’s Matt Labash and the Weekly Standard trying to mislead you about taxation and the income distribution: You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them” — the rapacious 1 percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing (a Revolution is no place for facts and figures). You might as well say that the 20 percent of Americans who smoke cigarettes regularly pay 95 percent of federal tobacco excise taxes while 70 percent of the population pays nothing. The genius of the conservative rhetorical move here is that most people think of the taxes that you pay when you “do your taxes” in April as being your income taxes.
Finance & Development, December 2010 - Leveraging Inequality Finance & Development, December 2010, Vol. 47, No. 4 Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière PDF version Long periods of unequal incomes spur borrowing from the rich, increasing the risk of major economic crises THE United States experienced two major economic crises over the past 100 years—the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007. Are these two facts connected? Shifting wealth We looked at the evolution of the share of total income controlled by the top 5 percent of U.S. households (ranked by income) compared with ratios of household debt to income in the periods preceding 1929 and 2007 (see Chart 1). In the more recent period (1983–2007), the difference between the consumption of the rich and that of the poor and middle class did not widen as much as the differences in incomes of these two groups. In other words, the increase in the ratios of debt to income shown in Chart 1 was concentrated among poor and middle-class households. Modeling the facts Policy options References
Why the Rich Are Getting Richer The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost -- the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity -- will never return. They are probably right. And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Register for free to continue reading. Registered users get access to three free articles every month. Have an account?
INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE. NEWS, COMMENTARY & INSIGHT Finance & Development, September 2011 - Unequal = Indebted Finance & Development, September 2011, Vol. 48, No. 3 Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière PDF version Higher income inequality in developed countries is associated with higher domestic and foreign indebtedness ECONOMISTS have long worried about the growing chasm between countries that borrow heavily internationally and those that dish out the loans. But there is another, domestic dimension to the pileup of international obligations. Why the United States has built such persistent and large deficits in its current account—which covers all noninvestment international transactions, including exports and imports, dividends and interest, and remittancese—is a matter of some debate. In current research we therefore extend the work reported in “Leveraging Inequality” (F&D, December 2010), which dealt with only the United States, to include an open-economy dimension. Modeling the facts An economic model can clearly illustrate these links between income inequality and current account deficits.
Where Is Our Oil Price Collapse? From Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform Where Is Our Oil Price Collapse? Make no mistake about it, without plentiful, cheap, and easy to access oil, the United States of America would descend into chaos and collapse. The fantasies painted by “green” energy dreamers only serve to divert the attention of the non critical thinking masses from the fact our sprawling suburban hyper technological society would come to a grinding halt in a matter of days without the 18 to 19 million barrels per day needed to run this ridiculous reality show. “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. In the six years since this report there has been unprecedented oil price volatility as the world has reached the undulating plateau of peak cheap oil. But, a funny thing happened on the way to another oil price collapse. Some short term factors will continue to support higher oil prices. Surging Developing World Demand A Plunging US Dollar
Public Citizen Groups Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division champions consumer interests before the U.S. Congress and serves as a government watchdog. We engage in public education and advocacy, and are focused on the following: - Strengthening health, safety and financial protections. - Ensuring access to the courts to hold corporations accountable for wrongdoing. - Strengthening our democracy by exposing and combating the harmful impact of money in politics. Public Citizen’s Energy Program works to combat climate change by promoting safe, affordable and environmentally sustainable energy. Learn more about our work. The mission of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch is to ensure that in this era of globalization, a majority have the opportunity to enjoy America's promises: economic security, a clean environment, safe food, medicines and products, access to quality affordable services such as health care and the exercise of democratic decision-making about the matters that affect their lives.
Free exchange: All men are created unequal INEQUALITY is one of the most controversial attributes of capitalism. Early in the industrial revolution stagnant wages and concentrated wealth led David Ricardo and Karl Marx to question capitalism’s sustainability. Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the “Great Compression” that followed the second world war. But a modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, is an authoritative guide to the question. The book suggests that some 20th-century conventional wisdom was badly wrong. The centrepiece of Mr Piketty’s analysis is the ratio of an economy’s capital (or equivalently, its wealth) to its annual output. Pre-1914 economies were very unequal. Victorian values
The art of business and the science of economics Business and economics are tied up together in lots of people's minds. After all, they're both about money, aren't they? An awful lot of people seem to believe that economics is Big Business and business is small economics. (Even the generally reliable Economist magazine seems to use this definition in deciding what should go in its business or economics sections.) The failure to keep the two apart leads to some bizarre misconceptions in the popular understanding. Business is the art of commerce. Sure there are skills that are important for successful business life - like managing people well, knowing how to make a spreadsheet, giving great powerpoint - but there’s nothing academic about them. So why does business studies exist as an independent academic subject? Secondly, business professionals want a useable economics and are willing to pay for it. Economics is scientific in the sense that its positive goal is the disinterested study of economic phenomena. Two kinds of utilitarianism
National Institute on Money in State Politics The Institute's Blog: Nonpartisan. Timely. Transparent. The Sun Never Rises: Sources of Michigan’s Dark Money Set to Remain HiddenTwo days after Christmas, Governor Rick Snyder gave a belated gift to dark money groups and those donors who felt stifled by Michigan’s campaign finance limits. Thanks for your Support We're thankful for new general support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the Institute's work to invigorate debate about the role money plays in elections and policy decisions with data-backed evidence. Watch for Updates! We now offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds of our data that enable you to stay up-to-date on our data, track new reports, and see new contributions to candidates, parties, ballot measures, committees and states.
Desigualdad, ¿El problema social de los próximos años? - Econstuff | Econstuff Durante los últimos días la econosfera ha puesto el foco en la desigualdad, un tema de creciente interés tanto por su relación con la actividad económica como por el problema social que representa, en un momento en el que parece que dejamos una crisis económica atrás mientras la crisis social permanece como una parte cada vez más relevante de la nueva realidad que se está gestando. Ya en la reunión que tuvo Janet Yellen con los senadores, un tema recurrente por parte de estos fue preguntarle sobre la desigualdad y lo que se podía hacer para solucionar un problema que a veces no se remedia únicamente con aumentos continuados del PIB. Janet Yellen (1): This is a very serious problem, it’s not a new problem, it’s a problem that really goes back to the 1980s, in which we have seen a huge rise in income inequality En el anterior gráfico podemos ver la evolución de dos ratios para el caso Español. Fuente: Inequality from generation to generation: the United States in Comparison
John Lanchester · The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway: The Belgian Solution · LRB 8 September 2011 Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. I’m told that the cliché du jour in financial markets involves reference to ‘uncharted territory’. A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. Would that matter?
PoliticusUSA.com- Real Liberal Politics