According to mainstream economic theory, globalization tends to “lift all boats,” and has little effect on the broad distribution of incomes. But “globalization” is not the same as the elimination of tariffs and other import barriers that confer rent-seeking advantages to politically influential domestic producers. As Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik frequently points out, economic […]
A Brief History Of (In)equality
The Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen recently gave a talk in Lisbon about inequality that demonstrated one of the virtues of being a scholar of economic history. Eichengreen, like me, glories in the complexities of every situation, avoiding oversimplification in the pursuit of conceptual clarity. This disposition stays the impulse to try to explain more about the world than we […]
Economics In The Age Of Abundance
Until very recently, one of the biggest challenges facing mankind was making sure there was enough to eat. From the dawn of agriculture until well into the Industrial Age, the common human condition was what nutritionists and public-health experts would describe as severe and damaging nutritional biomedical stress. Some 250 years ago, Georgian England was […]
Jobs And The Rise Of The Robots
For decades, people have been predicting how the rise of advanced computing and robotic technologies will affect our lives. On one side, there are warnings that robots will displace humans in the economy, destroying livelihoods, especially for low-skill workers. Others look forward to the vast economic opportunities that robots will present, claiming, for example, that […]
The Greater Depression
First it was the 2007 financial crisis. Then it became the 2008 financial crisis. Next it was the downturn of 2008-2009. Finally, in mid-2009, it was dubbed the “Great Recession.” And, with the business cycle’s shift onto an upward trajectory in late 2009, the world breathed a collective a sigh of relief. We would not, […]
Securing The Middle Class In The Internet Age
Ten years ago, the world emerged from the dot-com bust and started to look more soberly at the Internet’s potential. While speculative greed and fear of missing out might have overplayed the short-term outlook, the Internet’s immense longer-term prospects were never in doubt. I, and other optimistic economists, assumed that free information and communication would […]
The Long Short Run
Before 2008, I taught my students that the United States was a flexible economy. It had employers who were willing to gamble and hire when they saw unemployed workers who would be productive; and it had workers who were willing to move to opportunity, or to try something new in order to get a job. […]
Starving The Financial Squid
Is America’s financial sector slowly draining the lifeblood from its real economy? The journalist Matt Taibbi’smemorable description in 2009 of Goldman Sachs – “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” – still resonates, and for good reason. Back in 2011, I noted that finance […]
Inequality On The Horizon Of Need
By any economic measure, we are living in disappointing times. In the United States, 7.2% of the normal productive labor currently stands idle, while the employment gap in Europe is rising and due to exceed that of the US by the end of the year. So it is important to step back and remind ourselves […]
When Is Government Debt Risky?
A government that does not tax sufficiently to cover its spending will eventually run into all manner of debt-generated trouble. Its nominal interest rates will rise as bondholders fear inflation. Its business leaders will hunker down and try to move their wealth out of the companies they run for fear of high future corporate taxes. […]
Let it Bleed?
In the 12 years of the Great Depression – between the stock-market crash of 1929 and America’s mobilization for World War II – production in the United States averaged roughly 15% below the pre-depression trend, implying a total output shortfall equal to 1.8 years of GDP. Today, even if US production returns to its stable-inflation […]
Grand Mal Economics
Across the North Atlantic region, central bankers and governments seem, for the most part, helpless in restoring full employment to their economies. Europe has slipped back into recession without ever really recovering from the financial/sovereign-debt crisis that began in 2008. The United States’ economy is currently growing at 1.5% per year (about a full percentage […]
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