If you think Independence Day came to be a national holiday as an organic expression of pride in our successful rebellion against England, you need to think twice.
Read more...Average national income is a notoriously imperfect measure of the average person’s well-being.
Read more...Clearly the stories of Nelson Mandela and Edward Snowden are very different, but there are some parallels that almost no one in the media is willing to acknowledge.
Read more...Inquality.org, which is a portal for news and data about income inequality, has published a particularly well-presented paper, The Political History of American Inequality, by Colin Gordon, a professor of history at the University of Iowa who has focused on 20th century American public policy and political economy. I’ve sampled it, and it’s clear and engagingly written and has great interactive chart porn,
Read more...Readers were duly exercised about a paper published by Greg Mankiw which had to go through so many hoops to promote the idea that inequality was the result of merit as to be worthy of our Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity.
Suffice it to say further ridicule of Mankiw is in order, and Parramore provides a useful contribution.
Read more...When union members demand decent pay levels and work conditions, they are charged with featherbedding and overmanning or the new neoliberal catchall, “demanding uncompetitive wages”. But when the upper crust loots institutions, the mainstream media is typically missing in action.
Read more...Yves here. This post swings for the fence, but still makes an important point about how the uprising in Turkey differs from Arab Spring and the Orange Revolution.
Read more...Joe Firestone reviews the state of play on the Social Security/Medicare “reform” debate.
Read more...Apparently, the most important criterion for getting an important post in the Obama Administration is telling Big Lies, better yet with data. Jason Furman claims Walmart is a “progressive success story.”
Read more...A weak job market, killer student loans and a crappy economy mean continued struggle for America’s college grads.
Read more...The Grey Lady roused itself to profile Glenn Greenwald after his blockbuster stories of the last two days: the first on a secret court order now in effect for Verizon to provide the NSA on all telephone records in its systems, the second on the PRISM program, which has given the NSA direct access to servers of information giants including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, since 2007. But the piece is mean-spirited, underplaying Greenwald’s credentials and coming too close for comfort to character sniping.
Read more...It’s puzzling to see Elizabeth Warren pull her punches on a pressing issue for middle class families, that of student debt.
Read more...It’s hard to know where to begin with a story up at the Wall Street Journal, Risk-Averse Culture Infects U.S. Workers, Entrepreneurs.
Read more...New Gallup polls shows that economic conservatism is down, social liberalism is up.
Read more...By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
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