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George Tyler

George Tyler is a former US deputy Treasury assistant secretary and senior official at the World Bank. He is the author of What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class … And What Other Nations Got Right.

George Tyler

Getting to zero—what’s the beef?

George Tyler 3rd December 2021

Most livestock land will have to be repurposed as carbon sinks to remove the huge global emissions related to food production.

Not seeing the wood for the trees—the EU’s environmental blunder

George Tyler 7th September 2021

Supporting a conversion to wood burning has unwittingly incentivised power plants to increase greenhouse gases.

US economy mired in viral stagnation loop

George Tyler 31st August 2020

The travails of the US economy come amid a politics never so poisonous since the civil war.

A European Union climate agenda for COP26

George Tyler 27th February 2020

The EU should bring a new climate agenda to Glasgow—including a roadmap for emerging nations to embrace a future beyond fossil fuels.

Unpacking supreme courts to restore checks and balances

George Tyler 7th November 2019

Democracy is threatened by politicisation of constitutional courts. Unorthodox tactics are required to restore their role.

The superiority of codetermination

George Tyler 16th July 2019

The United States should learn from the better performance of European companies which have worker representation on boards.

What European Democracies Can Teach America

George Tyler 22nd June 2018

Amid authoritarian and illiberal forces buffeting social democracies, it is helpful to renew appreciation for their political architectures, especially the central role developed over a century and a half for the principle of proportional representation (PR). Its absence is one factor responsible for the poor quality of American democracy documented in Billionaire Democracy. In contrast […]

Fake News And The Fairness Doctrine

George Tyler 23rd May 2018

Fake news in America’s public square is a failure of its information marketplace. Remediation should occur through enhanced marketplace competition, not government censorship. I have argued that the quality of democracy is lower in America than in much of Europe. It lacks co-determination, for instance, which is why US wages stagnate even as inflation-adjusted wages […]

Codetermination Enters The American Political Debate

George Tyler 20th April 2018

Three senators have introduced unprecedented legislation mandating that employee representatives must comprise one-third of Boards of Directors at publicly-listed US corporations. Upgraded corporate governance with codetermination is an unfamiliar concept to most Americans. Its appearance acknowledges the weakness of conventional tools to end wage stagnation. And it reflects frustration by Democratic senators Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth […]

Social Media Platforms Should Tell The Truth

George Tyler 26th March 2018

The high quality democracies of northern Europe are an unnatural construct, history teaching us that the universal default setting of human society is authoritarianism. There are many key elements in crafting and sustaining such high quality democracies, including engendering a common body of trusted information, a communitarian spirit, the rule of law and the like. […]

American Democracy Sold To The Highest Bidder

George Tyler 30th January 2018

Aristotle measured the quality of democracy by the extent to which politics constrains the economically powerful, allowing the preferences of the landless to be reflected in public policy. According to a new analysis, American democracy gets a failing grade on Aristotle’s test while the countries of northern Europe are star pupils. Path-breaking recent research has […]

Trump: Reaganomics Redux

George Tyler 22nd November 2016

It’s wages, stupid! Analysts are pondering why millions of the same voters who favored President Obama in 2008 and (less enthusiastically) in 2012 pivoted to favor his antithesis, Donald Trump, in 2016. Economic frustration centered on stagnant wages is mostly the answer, reflected in a generalized desire for “change” expressed by 39 percent of voters […]

Why US Democrats Must Derail Republican Party Nationalist Populism With Economic Populism

George Tyler 15th February 2016

The Republican presidential aspirant nominated at this summer’s convention is likely to become that party’s nominee in part by invoking jingoist and xenophobic themes drawn from the playbooks of eastern European authoritarians. Miloš Zeman, the Czech President asserts, for example, “I do not want Islam in the Czech Republic.” And Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has […]

Labor Day: Good Time To Readdress Pay And Collective Bargaining

George Tyler 7th September 2015

President Obama has belatedly awakened to the plight of America’s middle class whose economic fate is dependent almost entirely on wages. Taking a lead from his predecessors since Ronald Reagan, Obama proved indifferent during much of his first term to the deterioration in the collective bargaining position of employees at US workplaces – the key […]

Why We Need A Cultural Revolution In American Capitalism

George Tyler 10th August 2015

Corporations are at the center of market fundamentalist capitalism practiced in the UK and US. Yet, in contrast to northern Europe, they are only weakly embedded in their communities, insufficiently attuned to the aspirations and needs of the wider stakeholder community. Rather than government diktats, the solution is cultural changes whereby inspired societal norms produce […]

Why President Obama Needs To Reframe The Wage Debate

George Tyler 28th November 2014

Stagnant wages have robbed the American middle class of opportunity. Wage compression is why fewer Americans now believe they are middle class; remarkably, the share of Americans who self-identify as below-middle class has risen 60 percent since 2008 to near equivalence in size with those identifying as middle class. Horatio Alger has emigrated to Australia […]

President Obama Is Emulating Buchanan Instead Of Lincoln

George Tyler 21st July 2014

Obama is Leaving Economic Inequality for his Successors to Fix President Obama is emulating former President James Buchanan. His economic agenda is to kick the can down the road, leaving his successors an America of widening economic inequality without prospect of remediation. The Obama Presidency is facing the most toxic, polarized environment since the antebellum […]

Britain’s, Not France’s, Middle Class Is Being ‘Run Into The Dust’

George Tyler 20th February 2014

While France and Britain cooperate on multiple fronts, the Cameron government is not above using its neighbor as a political foil. Grant Shapps, conservative party chairman opined in January 2014 that French President Hollande had “led his countrymen back into the dust” which is “exactly what [Labour leader] Miliband wants to do with the British […]

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


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Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


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Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


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ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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