Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.
The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.
Looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul; it’s good for business. The
Borrowers were told not to worry about paying the ever-mounting debt, because house prices would keep rising and they could refinance, taking out some of the capital gains to buy a car or pay for a va...
We were not rich, but my parents had adjusted their lifestyle to their incomes—and in the end that is a big part of the battle.
It’s expensive to keep 2.3 million people in prison.
In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for...
To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of t...
The other vision is of a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been narrowed, where there is a sense of shared destiny, a common commitment to opportunity and fairness, where t...
The magnitude of the underfunding was astronomical. One study of just the 348 companies in the S&P 500 with defined benefit pension programs concluded that this underfunding amounted to between $184 a...
I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were...
Decisions were often made because of ideology and politics. As a result many wrong-headed actions were taken, ones that did not solve the problem at hand but that fit with the interests or beliefs of...
The most important endowment, from our perspective, is a society’s learning capacities (which in turn is affected by the knowledge that it has; its knowledge about learning itself; and its knowledge a...
What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21
Those at the top have managed to design a tax system in which they pay less than their fair share—they pay a lower fraction of their income than do those who are much poorer.
The abolition occurred just as it became clear that much of the wealth that had been seemingly created in the Roaring Nineties was nothing more than a phantasm, that much of the wealth was stolen prop...
As those, for instance, in Ireland celebrate the return to growth (in 2015 it was Europe’s fastest growing economy),1 they need to remember: every (or almost every) economy recovers from a downturn.
The Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934, and, together with other checks and balances (including class-action suits), it helped build a sense of professional ethics among managers,...
The United States was the most unequal of the advanced industrial countries in the mid-1980s, and it has maintained that position.92 In fact, the gap between it and many other countries has increased:...
Comprehensive reform of bankruptcy laws—from the treatment of derivatives to underwater homes and to student loans. Bankruptcy law offers another example of how the basic rules of the game that determ...