As we look out at the world, the United States not only has the highest level of inequality among the advanced industrial countries, but the level of its inequality is increasing in absolute terms rel...
A lo largo de la historia, las economías que han florecido son aquellas en las que los acuerdos se sellan con un apretón de manos. Sin confianza, los tratos de negocios basados en el consenso de que l...
As the good middle-class jobs—requiring a moderate level of skills, like autoworkers’ jobs—seemed to be disappearing relative to those at the bottom, requiring few skills, and those at the top, requir...
What’s worrying is that those in the 1 percent, in attempting to claim for themselves an unjust proportion of the benefits of this system, may be willing to destroy the system itself to hold on to wha...
University of California professor Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, and Stefanie Stantcheva of the MIT Department of Economics, carefully taking into account the incenti...
The economic elite have pushed for a framework that benefits them at the expense of the rest, but it is an economic system that is neither efficient nor fair. I explain how our inequality gets reflect...
The U.S. incarceration rate is the world’s highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their...
The NASDAQ Composite Index, containing mostly technology shares, soared from 500 in April 1991 to 1,000 in July 1995, surpassing 2,000 in July 1998, and finally peaking at 5,132 in March 2000. The sto...
Opponents of regulation always complain that it’s bad for business. Regulations that prevent pollution, of course, are bad for businesses that would have otherwise polluted. Regulations that prevent c...
Most importantly, it became clear that the name free trade agreement was itself a matter of deceptive advertising: it was really a managed trade agreement, managed especially for special corporate int...
Lack of health insurance is one factor contributing to poorer health, especially among the poor. Life expectancy in the United States is 78 years, lower than Japan’s 83 years, or Australia’s or Israel...
Jean-Claude Juncker, the proud architect of Luxembourg’s massive corporate tax-avoidance schemes and now the head of the European Commission, has taken a hard line—perhaps understandably, given that h...
In other advanced industrial countries, families don’t have to worry about how they will pay the doctor’s bill, or whether they can afford to pay for their parent’s health care. Access to decent healt...
If economic power in a country becomes too unevenly distributed, political consequences will follow. While we typically think of the rule of law as being designed to protect the weak against the stron...
El aumento de las desigualdades corroe la confianza; tiene un impacto económico similar al de un disolvente universal. Crea un mundo económico en el que hasta los ganadores son precavidos. Y los perde...
Americans all benefit from the physical and institutional infrastructure that has developed from the country’s collective efforts over generations.
A) Recent U.S. income growth primarily occurs at the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (b) As a result there is growing inequality. (c) And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually w...
The powerful try to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their interests, realizing that, in a democracy, they cannot simply impose their rule on others. In one way or another, they have to co-...
In America the share of national income going to the top .01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top .01% got in the Gilded Age.9
Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.62 Such expenditures are not the hallmarks of a well-performing economy and society. Money that is spent on security—pr...