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...When a stalwart member of the right disassociates itself from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial policies, you know things are bad. Thanks to Brad DeLong for this item. From the National Review’s blog, The Corner: ….the Wall Street Journal editorial conference…. I was… well, no, not foaming at the mouth, but gaping in wonder at […]
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...This article on the Guardian’s website, on the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to be sufficiently pro-consumer, pro-safety in its drug approval process, does a nice job of summing up the issues (and poking holes in the FDA’s lame defenses). One particularly fine observation: Let’s not forget that a provision in the FDA […]
Read more...We Americans like to think highly of our supposed freedoms, yet we have allowed privacy and civil rights to be eroded in the name of security and convenience (and yes, I mean you, how many times have you given your personal coordinates to a website?) The EU is taking the view that Google is keeping […]
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...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...This post from Conglomerate (a blog I generally like) is an articulate rendition of an appallingly conventional line of thinking: This Sunday’s Washington Post featured a story on the increase in socially responsible investing over the last decade…. According to the Washington Post, over the past decade the number of socially responsible investment funds has […]
Read more...From Credit Slips: At the end of 2006, there was $12,588,200,000,000 outstanding in household debt — defined as consumer debt and mortgage debt combined. But there was only $11,065,500,000,000 in personal income for 2006. (Those are trillions of dollars.) If the United States spent none of its personal income for one year on “trivial” things […]
Read more...Normally I steer clear of politics, but this post by Australian Guy Rundle on Blair’s legacy makes some trenchant observations about what happens when you start dismantling a liberal social order: For the fact is that, under Tony Blair, Labour cut all ties not only with anything resembling democratic socialism, but also with social democracy, […]
Read more...I am beginning to suspect that many are reacting to the overstimulation of the modern world – the accelerating pace of change, data overload, time pressure, work and relationship instability – by turning off their brains. The rise of fundamentalism and the “family values” push, both efforts to turn back the clock, is one set […]
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 […]
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