debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
A recent ECB household-wealth survey was interpreted by the media as evidence that poor Germans shouldn’t have to pay for southern Europe. This column takes a look at the numbers. Whilst it’s true that median German households are poor compared to their southern European counterparts, Germany itself is wealthy. Importantly, this wealth is very unequally [...]
A most recent study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adult humans alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the total world wealth. The bottom half of the [...]
When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought that France was in big trouble and could learn much from America. So one can only wonder what he would have made of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. [...]
As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped [...]
Let Santorum and Romney duke it out for who will cut taxes on the wealthy the most and shred the public services everyone else depends on. The rest of us ought to be having a serious discussion about a wealth tax. Because if you really want to know what’s happening to the American economy you [...]
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 [...]
It sometimes appears that politicians’ concerns about global warming overheating is inversely proportional to scientists’ fears. Even committed political players appear increasingly resigned to largely letting things run their course. They do so even though there are veritable doomsday scenarios associated with global warming, and even the more standard scientific fare predicts a significant decline [...]
Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S.government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy. This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money — has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical [...]
The latest twist in the eternal debate over equality is the position currently adopted by neo-liberal politicians and expressed particularly clearly by the British Labour Party’s former prime minister, Tony Blair. In a rich society, it is argued, the great majority (say the top 80-85% of the income and wealth distribution) is materially so well [...]
In 1995, I published a book called The World After Communism. Today, I wonder whether there will be a world after capitalism. That question is not prompted by the worst economic slump since the 1930’s. Capitalism has always had crises, and will go on having them. Rather, it comes from the feeling that Western civilization is [...]
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