Harvard Business School’s Bizarre Rich Kids Problem
I’m late to write about the cover story in the Sunday New York Times magazine, on Harvard Business School’s efforts to promote “gender equity”.
Read more...Category Archives: Income disparity
David Dayen: BofA/Merrill Lynch Analyst Says QE and Housing Policy Boosting Inequality
Anyone surprised by the housing recovery is simply blind to the context that the Federal Reserve has administered a bazooka full of aid and comfort over the past few years. They bought up enough mortgage bonds to force interest rates to near-record lows, boosting the fortunes of asset holders. And in so doing they made housing an attractive investment product, bringing lots of Wall Street cash into the REO-to-rental play, at least for a short while. That predictably increased demand and put housing prices on their current trajectory.
Read more...Internalization of the Death of the American Dream: A Maine Microcosm
It’s odd to be going about one’s vacation and, like stepping on a rake and having it whack you in the face, stumble into a vignette that apostrophizes how much young people have internalized the fallen state of the American worker.
Read more...Stoneleigh: Promises, Promises … Detroit, Pensions, Bondholders And Super-Priority Derivatives
By Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss), co-editor of The Automatic Earth, cross posted from Automatic Earth
On July 18th, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. Detroit is merely the first of many municipalities to hit the wall, where the realization dawns that far too many promises have been made, and nowhere near all of them can be kept
Read more...David Dayen: Fast Food, Retail Worker Strikes Actually Honor King Legacy
The March on Washington’s 50th anniversary resulted in two commemorative events, including the one Saturday with comments by Eric Holder and Nancy Pelosi, and the one yesterday with a speech by President Obama. Needless to say this is a bit of an inversion of the original message of a March ON rather than WITH Washington. So I would say that the major tribute this week to the legacy of that march, a march for jobs and freedom, is actually today’s national retail worker strike for a higher wage, which takes what had been a one-off model and expanded it. Events are expected in 35 cities, maybe more. And where the initial events were just with fast-food workers at places like McDonald’s and Wendy’s, apparently workers at retailers like Macy’s are involved in some cities.
Read more...Why the US Economy Won’t Fully Recover
Yves here. It almost seems quaint to think that someone (in reality, large swathes of the investor and orthodox economics community) thinks the US economy will someday bear a passing resemblance to its former bubble-stoked vigor.
Read more...How Milton Friedman’s NAIRU Has Increased Inequality, Damaging Innovation and Growth
Yves here. Advocates of Galtian “winner take all” markets frequently invoke both moralistic and efficiency-based arguments for more income inequality. The problem with their argument that “creators” should get to hoard their winnings is that their success does not take place in a vacuum, but is built on the back of generations of cultural, technological, and procedural advances, as well as public-provided infrastructure. And as the post below describes, the idea that a more Darwinian economic order produces higher growth is also spurious.
Read more...The Rise of Bullshit Jobs
Yves here. I’m going to reverse my normal convention when I have a cross post but have something to add. Here I first offer you a MacroBusiness post (which in the layered ways of the Web relies heavily on an article by David Graeber) and natter afterwards.
Read more...Why Progressives Are Lame
Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
Read more...Barbara Garson: How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying
Yves here. This post by Barbara Garson, which originally appeared at TomDispatch, describes how big companies squeeze down even more on workers by turning what were once full-time jobs into part-time positions to avoid providing benefits and to push pay even lower (workers who are desperate to get more hours will also accept reduced wages, working off the clock, and abusive work conditions).
Read more...“Profitless” Stocks, Underinvestment, the Cannibalization of Labor, and Levitating Stock Prices
our humble blogger generally refrains from writing about stocks for a host of reasons. But several interesting news bits have prompted me to depart from my usual practice.
Read more...Bill Moyers with Richard Wolff on Inequality, Wage Slavery, and Economic Justice
Bill Moyers has a wide ranging and lively chat with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of many books including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Wolff is a fierce advocate of the need for policies for fairer wages for workers and argues why better pay is salutary not just for the employees but the broader economy.
Read more...Stephanie Kelton: Reading Between the Lines – A Memo from Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles
Stephanie Kelton does an important service in discussing a memo from the Fed chairman during the Roosevelt Administration, Marriner Eccles. I was reminded of Eccles’ a fine appreciation for how the real economy worked and how government actions affected business. This keen eye for the fundamentals is sorely absent among most macroeconomists and policy experts today.
Read more...More Obama Big Lies: Touting Sweatshop Amazon Warehouse Jobs as “Middle Class”
Obama needed a visual to show that, no, really, truly, jobs really are being created somewhere in America for yet another one of his exercises in trying to pretend that he’s on the side of ordinary Americans. So Obama used as his backdrop an American success story, Amazon, which is opening a new a warehouse in Chattanooga and hiring 7,000 people. That choice tells you everything about what Obama’s “middle class” program is really about.
Read more...Yes, Virginia, Rich People Are Not the Same as You and Me. They Cheat More.
When middle class and low income people complain about the lousy ethics among what passes for our ruling classes, they usually shrug it off as jealousy, class warfare, and/or the sensationalism.
Guess what? Conventional wisdom is right.
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