America's Political Economy
June 13, 2018
Did inequality really surge in the US from the 1970s? Did earnings for the majority really flatline from the bicentennial? Recently, there has been a fair amount of pushback on these two cornerstones of the new inequality narrative. The…
Read More
March 20, 2018
How is inequality in America produced and reproduced? How do class, race and gender interact? How do educational opportunities and disadvantages, family structure and incarceration combine to produce the massively unequal society that we…
February 18, 2018
Better off Americans go to College. Poor Americans don’t.It’s obvious. We all know it. But when plotted, the relationship is stark.In fact the relationship is linear. 75 percent of kids with poor parents don’t go to…
January 20, 2018
Across much of America (and many other countries) the concentration of monopoly power in the hands of a handful of employers in local labour markets, gives them huge bargaining power in relation to workers, even when labour is scarce…
December 9, 2017
Pressed by a New York Times reporter yesterday for evidence that immigration hurts American workers, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller said: “I think the most recent study I would point to is the study from George Borjas that he…
October 28, 2017
In the 1970s America embarked on a ghastly experiment in mass incarceration. This is part of a wider process of criminalization, driven by shifting race relations, the “War on drugs” and local law enforcement politics. It is anomalous in…
October 19, 2017
A short but important piece appeared in FT alphaville this morning from the always-illuminating Matt Klein. He is riffing on papers given at the conference hosted by Peterson recently on the future of macroeconomic policy that featured all…
July 10, 2017
Who will be the new Fed chair? No doubt one should not exaggerate the significance of individuals. The Friedman and Schwartz approach to the history of American capitalism has its limits (Their monetarism combined with social theoretic…
July 4, 2017
As climate changes and temperatures rise, who will hurt? At least since the 1980s and Ulrich Beck’s pathbreaking work on Risk Society, the question of the social stratification of risks has been posed. At a global level it has long…
June 30, 2017
Quartz did a good write up of some research by the Minneapolis Fed on the differential impact of the recent crisis on different income strata. In general recessions hit top incomes hardest. They have the most to lose and their incomes…
June 18, 2017
America’s infrastructure deficits can be measured and assessed by national surveys. According to the annual infrastructure report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers there is a $ 2 trillion, ten-year funding…
June 9, 2017
On the politics of infrastructure point, a little item the in-tray this morning is priceless. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs tweets this morning from Beijing: “Arrived in China, as always impressed by condition of airport,…
June 6, 2017
One of the basic legitimations of capitalist growth and politics in capitalist democracies is productivity improvement. This can be disruptive. It can force social upheaval and creative destruction. But the triumph over scarcity –…
April 27, 2017
Fed is getting serious about shrinking its $ 4.48 trillion balance sheet. The economics and politics of this are extremely delicate. It is both crucial to future outlook for the US and world economy that they get this right and a…
April 25, 2017
Food insecurity in the US. This remarkable post has been rattling around in my head ever since I first clicked the link. I think it has been jogged back to the top of stack by a bizarre encounter last night on Broadway with a man railing…
Uncategorized,America's Political Economy
April 13, 2017
News from the inequality front. A fascinating new paper by Fatih Guvenen and Greg Kaplan digs deep into the income shares data. If you start with the famous Saez 99/1 % income shares graph, it is clear that the action starts in the 1980s…
Notes on the Global Condition,America's Political Economy
April 7, 2017
Why are 1990s NAFTA and EU Expansion not more commonly compared? They both bridge developed high-cost markets with emerging market economies. They were both pushed forward in the most ebullient phase of post-Cold War convergence optimism.…
March 30, 2017
Fascinating story in the FT this morning about surge in US takeovers in Europe. The dollar is strong, the Eurozone is recovering and America’s corporations are using the opportunity to aggressively consolidate their position.…
March 27, 2017
If there is a recent experience that inspires visions of the resurrection of American industry, it is the story of fracking which has transformed the US energy sector and threatens to do the same to the global oil industry. By establishing…
March 26, 2017
In thinking about the capacity for action displayed by the American state in the 2008 crisis I’ve been struck by the extent to which military language and images suffuse economic policy making discourse. In Tim Geithner this reaches its…
March 20, 2017
The other German-American encounter this weekend: Schäuble and Mnuchin at the G20 Baden-Baden March 2017The state of US trade policy at this moment seems to be genuinely indeterminate, so much so that it has functional consequences for…
March 18, 2017
Earlier this month the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) put out a fascinating and underreported document on the taxes paid by largest US corporations. ITEP focused its attention on the 258 corporations within the S&P…
March 17, 2017
Trump’s Presidency is a nightmarish freak show. He takes up so much space that it is hard to focus on anything else. He is personally identified with xenophobia, racism, sexism and economic nationalism, but he is now taken to…
February 24, 2017
Prime age Americans are dropping out of the labour market. The numbers of men dropping out of the labour force are large and much discussed. But that phenomenon is far from peculiar to the US. It is common across the developed,…
February 23, 2017
One of the things that has been most rapidly “normalized” about the Trump administration is its economic nationalism. Trump just is an economic nationalist. In fact as Laderman and Simms have shown he has been a mercantilist…
February 21, 2017
In recent blogpost I tried to lay out a general map of monetary/financial politics on which to locate the familiar stereotypes of monetary history – Weimar hyperinflation, bond vigilantes, Glorious Revolution “virtuous circle” etc –…
February 20, 2017
How does the mass of new data on inequality in wealth and income relate to discussions about class and power in America? Question prompted by some very striking data compiled by Phoenix Marketing International on the wealthy in the US.…
February 18, 2017
Extraordinary new data on the relationship between race, religion and attitudes towards fiscal policy in the US from Melissa Deckman and coauthors Dan Cox, Robert Jones, and Betsy Cooper from PRRI . It confirms common knowledge, but to a…
Uncategorized,Notes on the Global Condition,America's Political Economy
February 17, 2017
The need for a pluralist, complex mapping of globalization was brought home to me by thinking about narratives of the 2008 crisis. “Global imbalances”, most dramatically the current account imbalance between the US and China…
February 14, 2017
A lot of questions out there today about future of the dollar as reserve currency in light of recent data showing substantial sell off of US government debt by major Asian holders in 2016. These are important questions. Nikhil Singh asked…
Notes on the Global Condition,America's Political Economy,Europe's Political Economy
February 13, 2017
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2912107 If it is true that the global economy relies more than ever on the dollar as discussed in a variety of recent posts. And if it is true that this dollarized global system is…
February 11, 2017
I wrapped up a post earlier today about the global role of the dollar by saying: “When The Economist says: “Unlike other aspects of American hegemony, the dollar has grown more important as the world has globalised, not less”, it is…
February 9, 2017
Today is a bumper day for inequality data and it all drives home a stark message about the US. In light of the response on facebook to an earlier post about the latest paper from Piketty (thanks Cory!), I thought people might find a recent…
Important new working paper from the entire team of Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman. http://www.nber.org/papers/w23119.pdf It extends previous work and announces the new database for…
February 7, 2017
Severing the ties of an internationally integrated economy is a messy business. You cannot stop the world and get off. Walling yourself in is a good way of discovering just how many ways you depend on the outside. …. Border regions…
February 5, 2017
“Dark matter” is a big deal in the American financial balance with the rest of the world. In visible trade the situation is the dramatic one that drives Trumpite rhetoric. America has a big trade deficit. It imports a lot of…