In a New York Times article, Daniel Gross sympathetically discusses a paper by MIT economists Peter Temin and Frank Levy on the role of institutional behavior and social attitudes in income inequality. As a preface to his comments about their work, he sets forth some of the conventional arguments for the inevitability of inequality, namely, […]
Read more...Bloomberg tells us, “India’s Tata Consultancy Plans to Hire 5,000 Workers in Mexico.” The rise of the rupee is making India less attractive for outsourcing. This development begs a couple of questions. First, will US companies have to go through disruption and risk as they chase cheaper labor to various countries as currency relationships change? […]
Read more...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...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...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...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...Many consumers can’t afford to trade up to new cars. The years and years of Detroit providing heavy financial subsidies has stopped creating incremental sales. And Ford called its sales in April “terrible.” With that as a starting point, how far down can things go? One reason I imagine this is underreported is New York, […]
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...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...According Robert Cringely at PBS, IBM is cutting at least 150,000 US jobs in its Global Services Division, and each US worker is to be replaced by a new overseas hire. This headcount cut, called Project Lean, bears out the populist view that corporate executives are greedy and outsourcing damages the American economy. As we […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik, if he thought it wasn’t beneath him, deserves an op-ed column at a well respected paper. He has managed to foment a good deal of lively debate among Serious Economists (the blogs involved include his, Brad DeLong’s, Mark Thoma’s, and Greg Mankiw’s) on the question of trade economics. For the most part, Dani […]
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...The Housing Bubble Blog today features “YKYAAFB When….” which stands for “you know you are a fucked borrower”. And many are insightful as well as revealing: Some readers suggested a topic about how a borrower might know they are overextended. “On a thread yesterday somebody made a: ‘You know you’re a redneck when…’ joke. It […]
Read more...Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Progress has focused on the issue of productivity, both in the current business cycle (he sees its decline as an underreported negative indicator) and longer term. A post on his blog Beat the Press points to a recent paper of his on productivity and reaches some […]
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