As Paul Sonn of NYU Law School writes in “The Fight for the Minimum Wage” in the American Prospect, various state legislatures, responding to pressure by industries that employ low-wage workers, are exempting various groups such as “tipped” restaurants workers and home health aides from the new federal minimum wage requirements by exploiting ambiguities in […]
Read more...An article in the New York Review of Books, “The Specter Haunting Your Office,” discusses three books, one by Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, meaning the disposable employee; one by Greg LeRoy, on the way corporations play states and muncipalities to extract economic concessions; and one by John Bogle, on “managers’ capitalism” and how it […]
Read more...One of the elements of the American Dream is that each generation will enjoy a better standard of living than its predecessors. As this article, “Not Your Father’s Pay: Why Wages Today Are Weaker” in the Wall Street Journal makes clear, that is no longer true: American men in their 30s today are worse off […]
Read more...Kash Mansouri at The Street Light has an excellent post, “Income Inequality, International Comparisons,” which goes a long way towards debunking the myth that income inequality is the result of education, or technology, or globalization. Note how the debate over inequality has evolved. We’ve (largely) gone from the denial phase to the “we have to […]
Read more...One news items that hasn’t gotten much press attention is the effort to close a loophole in the tax code by which the “carried interest” of private equity professionals, which is labor income, gets capital gains treatment. Moreover, the funds are often able to get their regular management fee the same favorable tax treatment as […]
Read more...John Whitehead, former co-chairman of Goldman, who with John Weinberg, presided over the firm when it went from being a commercial paper dealer and institutional equity broker to a top investment bank, decried Wall Street compensation levels in a Bloomberg interview: “I’m appalled at the salaries,” the retired co-chairman of the securities industry’s most profitable […]
Read more...….and is growing, read “The Poverty Business” in BusinessWeek. The key factiod: Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 […]
Read more...The headline above isn’t news per se, but someone reputable, in this case, Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta, have done the sleuth work of putting together the data to dimension the problem. The report says that the bottom quintile is “awash” with credit and now is one of the fastest growing segments. Ee found this […]
Read more...This blog seldom talks directly about the problems of the poor, but a post by Mark Thoma, citing a Center for Housing Policy study, provided striking and disheartening information about the plight of the impoverished class. It’s not news, but the poor can’t win. They often must live far from their workplaces to find affordable […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik’s blog features a paper by MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin that argues that rising income inequality in the US isn’t simply the result of market forces, but also institutional behavior and prevailing social values: Many economists attribute the average worker’s declining bargaining power to skill-biased technical change: technology, augmented by globalization, […]
Read more...By way of background, Greg Mankiw was Chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, is the author of a very popular economics textbook, teaches at Harvard, and is a advisor to Mitt Romney. Not surprisingly, that makes him a card carrying member of the economics orthodoxy. So when some Harvard students went on a hunger […]
Read more...Yesterday, our post “Costly Trade with China,” cited a study by the same name by the Economic Policy Institute which estimated the jobs lost to trade with China between 1997 and 2006 at 2.1 million. I wondered whether anyone had done the calculus as to what the offsets to these job losses might be, and […]
Read more...Paul Krugman’s Monday op-ed piece, “Another Economic Disconnect,” attracted the normal amount of attention in the blogsphere (which is to say quite a bit) with less enthusiasm than usual. And I must say I understand why. This piece was a little flat, and managed to miss some key issues. Disclosure: I am a fan of […]
Read more...In today’s op-ed piece, “Gilded Once More,” Paul Krugman picks a few factoids to show how our Gilded Age compares to the 19th century original. He finds that even though ours has a kinder face (due no doubt to the proliferation of TVs, fast food, and other creature comforts that make modern poverty look more […]
Read more...Alan Reynolds has become income inequality’s analogue to a global warming denier. Even after Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and President Bush have acknowledged that income disparity has increased, Reynolds is still fighting a rearguard action. He wrote a series of articles, starting with a Wall Street Journal comment last December, arguing against the widely-cited finding […]
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