debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
On my desk right now are reporter Timothy Noah’s new book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It and Milton and Rose Director Friedman’s classic Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. Considering them together, my overwhelming thought is that the Friedmans would find their task of justifying and advocating small-government libertarianism [...]
On the Rajan hypothesis and toxic theories of consumption The notion that inequality is causally related to the Great Recession of 2008 is currently one of the hottest topics in macroeconomics (see http://www.social-europe.eu/2012/04/the-impact-of-inequality-and-macroeconomics/). Before the crisis, most economists were hardly interested in the links between the distribution of income and financial stability. Although the higher [...]
I have blogged before about the very interesting INET conference ‘Paradigm Lost’ that was held in Berlin two weeks ago. One session in particular struck me as really interesting and rather novel: the session on inequality and macroeconomics. There are videos of this panel on INET’s YouTube channel but I thought I would share the bits I personally found most [...]
Can policy make a difference to inequality? In particular, can governments reduce inequality without killing the economy? As part of class prep, I’ve been looking at a story that has received very little discussion here, as far as I can tell, but is very interesting, to say the least: the remarkable decline in inequality that [...]
As evidence mounts that income inequality is increasing in many parts of the world, the problem has received growing attention from academics and policymakers. In the United States, for example, the income share of the top 1% of the population has more than doubled since the late 1970’s, from about 8% of annual GDP to [...]
Inequality is a top issue in the public agenda, partly as a result of the financial crisis that helped draw attention to this topic. As banks relied on the support of taxpayers and millions of workers had lost their jobs, people began to see the compensation of bank CEOs – with an average 2010 pay [...]
Via Gustav Horn I see that poor Hans-Olaf Henkel, that doughty scourge of the euro, is very distressed because everyone in Germany is always talking about equality and social justice and no-one about freedom. He concludes his tirade with an impression and a question to readers. His impression is that of all democracies Germany has [...]
Despite years of official talk about addressing global current-account imbalances, they remained one of the world’s main economic concerns in 2011. Global imbalances were, to be sure, smaller overall than before the crisis, but they did not disappear. Now some are increasing again, alongside inequality in many countries. That link is no accident. One often [...]
Wherever progressives hit the streets in protest, a repeated (literally) slogan is, “we are the 99 percent”, confronting the one percent with its crimes of greed. The percentage reference is usually to annual income, and, less often but of equal if not more relevance, to wealth. How rich do you have to be to be [...]
Balanced budgets, wage restraint and more competitiveness for everybody – this is the result of the last European summit and the new definitive solution for the Eurozone crisis. Eurozone leaders (with the exception of David Cameron) have decided to follow the German way of doing business: since the euro’s introduction Germany has actually done everything [...]
Mr. President, we heard what you said last week in Kansas – about the dangers to our economy and democracy of the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top. We agree. And many of us are prepared to work our hearts to get you reelected – as long as you commit to doing what [...]
Via a circuitous Internet chain – Paul Krugman of Princeton University quoting Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon reading the Journal of Economic Perspectives – I got a copy of an article written by Emmanuel Saez, whose office is 50 feet from mine, on the same corridor, and the Nobel laureate economist Peter Diamond. Saez and [...]
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