declining real wages

73 results back to index


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The foundation of this vision emphasizes issues and programs that concern the families of all racial and ethnic groups so that individuals in these groups will come to see their mutual interests and join in a multiracial coalition to move America forward; it promotes the idea that Americans have common interests and concerns that cross racial and class boundaries—such as unemployment and job security, declining real wages, escalating medical and housing costs, the scarcity of quality child care programs, the sharp decline in the quality of public education, and the toll of crime and drug trafficking in all neighborhoods. This vision encourages Americans to see that the application of programs to combat these problems would benefit everyone, not just the truly disadvantaged; to recognize that the division between the suburbs and the central city is partly a racial one and that it is vitally important to emphasize city-suburban cooperation, not separation; and, finally, to endorse the idea that all groups, including those in the throes of ghetto joblessness, should be able to achieve full membership in society because the problems of economic and social marginality spring from the inequities in society at large and not from group deficiencies.

Although the wages of low-skilled women (those with less than twelve years of education) rose slightly in the 1970s, they flattened out in the 1980s, and continued to remain below those of low-skilled men. The wage gap between low-skilled men and women shrank not because of gains made by female workers but mainly because of the decline in real wages for men. The unemployment rates among low-skilled women are slightly lower than those among their male counterparts. However, over the past decade their rates of participation in the labor force have stagnated and have fallen further behind the labor-force-participation rates among more highly educated women, which continue to rise.

The disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is in part related to the nationwide decline in the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Fundamental structural changes in the new global economy, including changes in the distribution of jobs and in the level of education required to obtain employment, resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of increasing joblessness and declining real wages for low-skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system, the decreasing availability of lower-skilled blue-collar jobs, and the growing importance of training and education in the higher-growth industries adversely affected the employment rates and earnings of low-skilled black workers, many of whom are concentrated in inner-city ghettos.


pages: 56 words: 17,340

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years-I include here the Democratic opposition-there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner citiesthe whole raft of problems. You all know about them, and they're all getting worse. Just in the two years that George Bush has been in office three million more children crossed the poverty line, the debt is zooming, educational standards are declining, real wages are now back to the level of about the late 1950s for much of the population, and nobody's doing anything about it. In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

In an important recent study he points out that there is no doubt that the third world’s compulsory economic liberalism in the nineteenth century is a major element in explaining the delay in its industrialization” and in the very revealing case of India, the “process of de-industrialization” that converted the industrial workshop and trading center of the world to a deeply impoverished agricultural society suffering a sharp decline in real wages, food consumption, and availability of other simple commodities. “India was only the first major casualty in a very long list,” Bairoch observes, including “even politically independent third world countries [that] were forced to open their markets to Western products.” Meanwhile Western societies protected themselves from market discipline, and developed.

Nixon’s moves were among several factors that led to a huge increase in unregulated financial capital and a radical shift in its use, from long-term investment and trade to speculation. The effect has been to undermine national economic planning as governments are compelled to preserve market “credibility,” driving any economies “toward a low-growth, high-unemployment equilibrium,” Cambridge University economists John Eatwell comments, with stagnating or declining real wages, increasing poverty and inequality, and booming markets and profits for the few. The parallel process of internationalization of production provides new weapons to undermine working people in the West, who must accept an end to their “luxurious” lifestyle and agree to “flexibility of labor markets” (not knowing whether you have a job tomorrow), the business press orates happily.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

.^ Back in the 1980s, you used to read about the rising debt burden on households; for some reason, you don't read about it much in the 1990s anymore, even though the burden has continued to grow. You do still read about the concentration of wealth. The two phenomena are rarely seen as linked. But because of the decline in real hourly wages, and the stagnation in household incomes, the middle and lower classes have borrowed more to stay in place; they've borrowed from the very rich who PLAYERS have gotten richer. The rich need a place to earn interest on their surplus funds, and the rest of the population makes a juicy lending target.

Bond prices instantly fell WALL STREET over a full point, a moderately dramatic move, ignoring news elsewhere in the statistical release showing that average hourly earnings grew only three cents, to $11.06 — an annual rate of just over 3%, in line with inflation. For U.S. workers, who've experienced 20 years of declining real hourly wages, even this strong employment growth has been unable to deliver any wage improvement. To Wall Street eyes, however, that's good news: "wage inflation" is under control for now. There's nothing the bond ghouls hate more than real wage increases for anyone but themselves. Despite that wage sluggishness, and the good behavior of the general price indexes, the consensus is that the Fed will tighten again before long.

Clinton's political goal of positioning himself as a Democrat who is not feared on Wall Street." Growth must be throttled back to no more than 2.5%, or maybe 3% tops — below levels that might make possible sharper reductions in unemployment, strengthen labor's bargaining position, and maybe even reverse, however temporarily, the 20-year decline in real wages. This story may be a plant, an attempt to calm the markets through leaking; Bradsher is a reporter who has had no trouble serving as a frictionless conduit for administration or Fed propaganda. But it does fit with events; challenging the Wall Street demand for slower growth would be political dynamite — just the kind of fight a not-feared-on-Wall-Street Democrat would shy away from.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

We turn to Nicaragua directly.33 The effects of IMF Fundamentalism, now administered with renewed fervor, “have been catastrophic” in Central America, the Jesuit journal Envío reports. Inflation has increased. Fiscal deficits have not declined as anticipated, but GOP growth has stagnated since 1985 and declined since 1988. Real wages have substantially fallen almost everywhere in Latin America, and the distribution of income is becoming even more skewed than before. “The word ‘development’ has disappeared from Latin America’s economic vocabulary”—though “profit” is on everyone’s lips, for the foreigner and the domestic islands of privilege.

Since the onset of “Menem’s Miracle” in 1989, “Neo-liberal private pillage has set up a system where individual wealth depends on public decay and economic regression,” with some 40 percent of the economically active population unemployed or underemployed, proliferating shanty towns, factories closed and not replaced by new enterprises, exploitation of the state as “an instrument for personal enrichment and private pillage,” reduction of expenditures for health, education and welfare to all time lows, negative growth rates, decreasing yearly rate of investment, and declining real wages. By now, over 60 percent of the 12 million inhabitants of Buenos Aires are not connected to the sewer system, one reason for the return of diseases that had been eradicated decades ago. The “speculative economy, reinforced by a neo-liberal economic policy, which impoverishes most of the population while destroying Argentina’s internal market and productive capacity, and scarce resources has generated a Hobbesian world, a savage struggle to survive while the elite continue to reap windfall profits.”

As usual, we do not learn that the famed “trickle down” policies have, in the past, produced a tiny trickle indeed, though read closely, the current reports indicate why the same can be expected this time around. The indicators look fine from Washington and Europe, Kamm reports, but they conceal rapid concentration of wealth, increased poverty including “critical poverty,” declining real wages, and the other usual concomitants of “miracles.” Former Brazilian President José Sarney writes that “in all countries” of Latin America, the foreign banks and other usual beneficiaries reap their rewards, “and what’s left is unemployment, slave wages, and terrible social indicators.” “The rich continue to get richer, the gap between them and the middle and lower classes widen,” and none of the policies that are so promising “have been able to wipe out poverty” (Nash), a curious and unexpected failure to achieve their goal, we are to understand.42 The most phenomenal success story of all is Chile, with its “prospering free-market economy generated by Gen.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

The best way to provide that flow is with dividends from co-owned wealth. Every American would get the dividends wired to his or her bank account or debit card. The amount of the dividends would vary from year to year depending on the income earned during the year. Total dividends would never exceed that income. In an age of declining real wages, shared wealth dividends would be an essential prop for our middle class. But they’d be more than that. Like social insurance, co-owned wealth dividends would connect Americans to each other and across generations. They’d be an affirmation that Americans belong to a society in which joint inheritances and productivity gains benefit everyone.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

His bank rescue and stimulus packages, combined with the Fed’s low interest rates, prevented the Great Recession from turning into another Great Depression. But the nation has not recommitted itself to the basic bargain. The 2010 health reform legislation was a step in the right direction but small in relation to the overall challenge. Consequently, most Americans will continue to experience relatively high unemployment and flat or declining real wages. Economic growth will be hampered. Growth, it should be noted, is not an end in itself. It is a means to better lives for all, generating not only higher incomes and possibilities for more personal consumption but also making room for the consumption of public improvements that benefit all—an atmosphere less polluted by carbon, good schools, better health care.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Alarms in the media and in politics about statistics showing declining real wages over time have often been describing a statistical artifact rather than an actual fact of life. It was during a period of “declining real wages” that the average American’s consumption increased dramatically and the average American’s net worth more than doubled. A further complication in measuring changes in the standard of living is that more of the increase in compensation for work takes the form of job-related benefits, rather than direct wages. Thus, in the United States, total compensation rose during a span of years when there were “declining real wages.” International Comparisons The same problems which apply when comparing a given country’s output over time can also apply when comparing the output of two very different countries at the same time.

A further inflationary bias in the consumer price index or other measures of the cost of living is that many goods which are increasing in price are also increasing in quality, so that the higher prices do not necessarily reflect inflation, as they would if the prices of the same identical goods were rising. The practical—and political—effects of these biases can be seen in such assertions as the claim that the real wages of Americans have been declining for years. Real wages are simply money wages adjusted for the cost of living, as measured by the consumer price index. But if that index is biased upward, then that means that real wage statistics are biased downward. Various economists’ estimates of the upward bias of the consumer price index average about one percentage point or more.


pages: 165 words: 48,594

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

The government-enhanced wealth at the top does not “trickle down” in the real world. Instead, boards of directors continue to see their self-interest in not sharing the recovery funds poured into their hands. Thus we experience continuing high unemployment, massive numbers of home foreclosures, declining real wages and job benefits, and inaccessibility of credit for personal borrowing. Stagnant consumption and investment are the results. They undermine the recovery of business and the stock markets. The global capitalist crisis deepens. What is to be done? The political and economic establishment simply repeats its usual mainstream mantra: maintain the post-2007 trickle-down program with maximum hype about the government’s efforts to end the crisis and wait until the crisis depresses wages and the costs of doing business enough that profit opportunities prompt capitalists to resume investing.


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

The long inflation from 1500 to 1700 is mainly attributed to the flood of silver from Spain’s New World conquests; in the modern world governments can print money instead of mining it, and have done so repeatedly both to pay their bills and, more creditably, in an attempt to trade off higher prices for lower unemployment. Fischer regards such explanations as inadequate. He insists both that inflation is only one symptom of a deeper process—one that also produces growing population, rising inequality, declining real wages, and ultimately a crisis—and that this process is repetitive, that in a qualitative sense all price revolutions are alike. In particular, the travails of the West in recent decades are typical of the end game of a price revolution—and we can take comfort from the fact that such difficult periods are inevitably followed by a prolonged “equilibrium.”


pages: 234 words: 53,078

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

On the other hand, if costs continue to grow along the path currently projected, it is inevitable that the number of uninsured will rise through time, even if there is an expansion of public sector health care programs. There is one other point about the importance of reversing conservative nanny state policies that redistribute income upward. In a period of stagnant or declining real wages, the public will be very resistant to efforts to raise taxes to support more public services of any type. On the other hand, in a climate of rising wages and general prosperity, there is less objection to diverting a portion of this prosperity towards meeting public needs. This means that if the economy is producing real gains for the bulk of the population, it will be much easier to obtain the revenue needed to address deep-seated social problems.


pages: 196 words: 53,627

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Two economists with the Urban Institute, Harry Holzer and the late Paul Offner, found that employment rates for black men between sixteen and twenty-four actually dropped in the 1990s, a decade of strong economic growth and job creation. Among the primary reasons cited for low labor participation rates in this subgroup were declining real wages, a significant skills gap between black and white workers, high black incarceration rates, and the disappearance of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs in recent decades. Holzer and Offner also reported that “employers perceive a stronger work ethic among immigrants of all racial groups, and a greater willingness to accept and retain low-skill jobs.”


pages: 205 words: 55,435

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is not quite so dramatic in the UK, but the number is still high. Here is the problem. Across the world, many who live this way have experienced a drop in real wages in recent years, so even if the overall employment situation is quite robust, as there are no savings to fall back on, many have suffered a fall in living standards. The decline in real wage growth started all the way back in the 1970s and has coincided with an increase in corporate profits. More recently the trend has gained momentum, though, to the extent that real wages are now falling in some countries, which has had the effect of suppressing aggregate consumer demand even further.

It is a multifaceted concept, and it is foolhardy to try to reduce it to a single figure.” 100 Last time I looked, only about 15% of the 11,000+ hedge funds generated any alpha. 101 Source: Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton (2017,1). 102 Where banks offload part of their loan book to long-term investors. 103 Only one European country has experienced a bigger decline in real wages (i.e. in living standards) this millennium, and that is the UK. 104 Exhibits 12.3.1–12.3.2 include hedge funds only. By not including long-only funds, am I saying they are not subject to the same dynamics? Not at all, but I don’t have access to corresponding data on long-only funds. 105 Moody’s (2017).


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

So they are contributing as well as receiving; indeed, many are just getting deferred earned income. Maybe we should call it an entitlement rather than a ‘benefit’, which suggests an act of charity. • Typically, the unemployed are in and out of work as short-term jobs become available, rather than unemployed permanently. And thanks to declining real wages since 2008, the numbers of ‘the working poor’ have risen, substantially exceeding the out-of-work poor.11 • Many are unable to work because of debilitating illnesses or serious impairments. In the UK the current ConDem coalition has waged a shocking campaign against the sick and disabled, attempting to force people who are in no condition to work to find work or face benefit cuts

‘Welfare’ is now coming to be used in the UK in the American pejorative sense, as something the inadequate are ‘on’, at the expense of the rest of us.150 This is a kind of class war waged by the Right at the level of the meaning of words. But the remarkable thing about the return of the rich is the lack of overt resistance, indeed the strange acceptance of austerity policies for the 90%, even after lower- and middle-income groups have seen years of declining real wages and benefits and erosion of public services. Many of those on low incomes have voted, against their own interests, for parties that protect and further plutocracy, the Tea Party in the US being the most striking example. Whipping up hostility to the poor, to immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers all helps to distract attention from the rich.


pages: 205 words: 58,054

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

The most authoritative social historian of early modern England, Keith Wrightson, sees production for the market a risk small households were “constrained to make” rather than an opportunity.10 The changes of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries produced poverty on an unprecedented scale, and a rising number of households dependent on wage-labor, during an era of declining real wages. Probably half the population relied mainly on wage labor by the middle of the seventeenth century. The national income of England doubled at least in the century up to 1640, but, as in other periods, the benefits of this expansion were unevenly shared and the results were greater inequality and increased social polarization.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

And yet the process of historical transition toward an informational society and a global economy is characterized by the deterioration of living and working conditions for a significant proportion of labor.132 This deterioration takes different forms in different contexts: the rise of unemployment in Europe; declining real wages (at least until 1996), increasing inequality, and job instability in the United States; underemployment and stepped-up segmentation of the labor force in Japan; informalization and downgrading of newly incorporated urban labor in industrializing countries; and increasing marginalization of the agricultural labor force in stagnant, underdeveloped economies.

In his study with Wolff, Howell shows that while the share of low-skilled workers in the US decreased across industries, the share of low-wage workers increased in these same industries. Several studies also suggest that higher skills are in demand, although not in shortage, but higher skills do not necessarily translate into higher wages.137 Thus, in the US, while decline in real wages was more pronounced for the lowest-educated, salaries for the college-educated also stagnated between 1987 and 1993.138 The direct consequence of economic restructuring in the United State s is that in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s family income plummeted. Wages and living conditions continued to decline until 1996 in spite of a strong economic recovery in 1993.139 Furthermore, half a century after Gunnar Myrdal pointed to the “American Dilemma,” Martin Carnoy, in a powerful book, documented that racial discrimination continues to increase social inequality, contributing to marginalizing a large proportion of America’s ethnic minorities.140 However, in 1996–2000, the sustained boom led by information technology and the new economy changed the trend, and increased average real wages at about 1.2 percent per year.

Much has been made of the shareholders democracy in the new forms of capitalism, but table 4.29 shows the extreme concentration of stock ownership in 1995, even when we include stock plans, mutual funds, individual retirement accounts, and other instruments of popular capitalism. While America is an extreme case of income inequality and declining real wages among the industrialized nations, its evolution is significant because it does represent the flexible labor market model at which most European nations, and certainly European firms, are aiming.141 And the social consequences of such a trend are similar in Europe. Thus, in Greater London between 1979 and 1991 real disposable income of households in the lowest decile of income distribution declined by 14 percent, and the ratio of real income of the richest decile over the poorest almost doubled in the decade, from 5.6 to 10.2.142 Poverty in the UK substantially increased during the 1980s and early 1990s.143 And for other European countries, taking the incidence of child poverty as an indicator of the evolution of poverty, on the basis of data collected by Esping-Andersen, between 1980 and the mid-1990s child poverty increased by 30 percent in the US, by 145 percent in the UK, by 31 percent in France, and by 120 percent in Germany.144 Inequality and poverty increased during the 1990s in the US, and in most of Europe.145 I take the liberty of referring the reader to volume III, chapter 2, for a summary presentation of data and sources on inequality and poverty, both for the United States and for the world at large.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

By 2013, the top 5 percent of Manhattan households were earning eighty-eight times what the poorest 20 percent did. The city’s 400,000 or so millionaires outnumbered the entire populations of New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Minneapolis. But many more New Yorkers were seeing their living standards eviscerated by a combination of declining real wages and escalating housing prices. In August 2013, a New York Times poll found that 55 percent of voters believed that Bloomberg’s policies favored the rich. Asked whether New York had become “too expensive for people like you to live in,” 85 percent answered yes.4 Propelled by the populist backlash to the city’s widening economic divide, de Blasio’s insurgent campaign put inequality front and center.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

He recounts the destruction of Uruguayan democracy, offering as the sole explanation “foreign intervention,” i.e., the application of the Kissinger doctrine of establishing “stable regimes” in Latin America; the systematic torture of 25,000 people, counting only the most severe cases; and the decline of real wages to a 1977 level that is at 60% of the 1962 level. A response to “terrorism” in Laqueur’s sense? Wilson Ferreira points out that the military coup that turned Uruguay into a chamber of horrors took place after the Tupamaros had been “completely destroyed”; “from June 1973 until today, there has not been a single subversive action.

Peasants turned to rebellion (stigmatized as “Communist terror”) when very moderate demands were met with mounting force and violence by the United States and its local allies drawn from the wealthy elites.111 As Jonathan Fast observed, “the Philippine counterinsurgency effort of the early 1950s served as a laboratory for later American involvement in Vietnam,” where General Lansdale “tried to repeat his Philippine success with Ngo Dinh Diem.”112 From 1946 to 1972 the economy of the Philippines expanded rapidly within its neo-colonial and dependency framework. The salient features of this “success” are described by van der Kroef: “declining real wage rates,113 persistent extreme disparities in income levels, the seemingly unchecked power of private U.S. capital (especially in the context of the operations of a few Filipino family corporations)”; and “graft and corruption prevalent everywhere, but particularly in government, whose machinery of justice was felt to benefit only the rich.”114 The democratic facade of the Philippines was extremely brittle in this society dominated by external interests and a tiny and very wealthy elite, including the U.S. favorite Ferdinand Marcos.


pages: 128 words: 35,958

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

On the other hand, if real wages could be reduced in accordance with the drop in productivity, then workers could keep working. If employers cannot push through cuts in nominal wages, the result will be higher unemployment in a context in which there is little or no inflation. However, if there is a modest amount of inflation, then the necessary decline in real wages can be accomplished by pay increases that lag the rate of inflation. When inflation “greases the wheels” of wages, modest rates of inflation can be associated with higher rates of employment.[29] There could be an ongoing tradeoff in which 2.0 to 3.0 percent inflation rates are associated with a lower level of unemployment and higher level of output than are inflation rates of 2.0 percent or less.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

But the irregulars get lower wages per hour—40 percent lower per hour for part-timers—and few of the benefits that apply to regular workers, including the twice-yearly bonuses that can amount to as much as a third of income, company-provided portions of health insurance, and pensions. The increase in irregular workers was not a display of flexibility—it was wage austerity that has resulted in declining real wages in every year but one since 2000. For much of the DPJ, the answer is to end flexibility and restore lifetime employment as much as possible. But there is no going back. The DPJ needs to learn from Sweden and Denmark, which have combined the best of market flexibility with security. Companies rise and fall.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

Dollarization did not stop inflation immediately, because adjustment to a new equilibrium level for the real exchange rate, undervalued when dollarization was launched, was reached through inflation. In addition, GDP started to recover following official dollarization, helped by a gradual recovery of confidence and favorable external shocks. In turn, unemployment has slowly declined and real wages have become more stable, although real wage levels are rather depressed in dollar terms. Historical and Structural Features of Ecuadoran Economy and Society The deep economic crisis of the late 1990s that preceded dollarization in Ecuador was, as argued in this book (see chapters 2 and 3), the culmination, in dramatic overtones, of an economic and governance crisis associated with several structural characteristics of Ecuadoran economy and society.

The exchange rate chosen for conversion of the money supply in sucres to dollars (25 sucres per dollar) was a very undervalued rate. As a consequence, there was a sharp reduction in real wages in dollars. As CRISIS AND DOLLARIZATION: AN OVERVIEW 13 inflation continued at a significant (although declining) pace after dollarization, real wages suffered from continuous inflation and slack in the labor market. However, as of early 2002, about two years after dollarization was adopted, the real exchange rate has started to appreciate and real wages to recover. In addition, following the pattern of other exchange-rate-based stabilization plans, a recovery of consumption and an increase in relative prices of nontradable goods and assets accompanied a recovery in economic activity, with declining unemployment and some improvement in deteriorated social conditions.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Instead of a flowering economy that makes the quality of life today vastly superior to that of forty or fifty years ago, millions go without work, much of our productive potential lies fallow, and our public sector is in squalor. People are working longer hours, with less vacation and later retirement, for stagnant or declining real wages, with less security, in an environment increasingly unable to sustain human civilization. Poverty has reached levels not seen for generations and found more commonly in the global South.26 In 2012 U.S. businesses held $1.73 trillion in liquid assets—or cash, in shorthand—that they were not investing for apparent lack of profitable options.


pages: 394 words: 124,743

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

(Haley had made sure it had a GPS, since none of us knew our way around Detroit.) Ron drove, with Brian, Diana, and me as passengers. Our first stop was Solidarity House. As I had told Ron when we first met, I believed in saving jobs. I had also written op-eds about America's growing income inequality and about the declining real wages of workers. I believed that organized labor could be a constructive part of the solution as long as it focused on those issues, rather than on featherbedding, trying to protect workers who were not pulling their weight, and blindly fighting technological change. During my eight and a half years at the New York Times I'd been a card-carrying member of the Newspaper Guild and had watched the company's eleven unions make all those mistakes.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Robert Brenner, in The Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), calls this the Full Employment Profit Squeeze thesis. The thesis has proved remarkably durable in the face of the stubborn persistence, since the ’70s, of weak economic performance among the rich countries—even with the return of mass unemployment, the worldwide enfeeblement of the labor movement, and the stagnation or outright decline of real wages. How can the effect of slower growth have so outlived its notorious cause? According to the thesis, post–Golden Age workers still enjoy too much power at the levels of shop floor, industry, and government. To risk full employment in these circumstances would only unleash another wage explosion, with labor costs again outrunning productivity.


pages: 165 words: 47,405

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Most of the rest was going for mergers and acquisitions and so on. These are huge sums. The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous. In any event, corporations and rich people barely pay taxes, so they’re doing fine. But the general population has gone through thirty years of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people working longer hours with fewer benefits. I don’t think there’s been a period like this in American history. The United States is still a very rich country. It’s got enormous advantages, of scale, resources, anything you can think of. But it’s being subjected to domestic policies that are frightening.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Except for the fact that no one is threatening to damage their kneecaps, they’re in the same dismal position as the classic victim of loansharking.”75 Herbert’s article explains that buying on credit used to help the middle-class family stay afloat, at least temporarily, but in the long run, many of these families have actually gone “deeper and deeper into debt, in large part because of the overuse of credit cards.”76 Citing a report titled “Borrowing to Make Ends Meet” (compiled by a nonpartisan public-policy group), Herbert states that “more and more Americans are using credit cards to bridge the difficult gap between household earnings and the cost of essential goods and services.”77 Heightening this predicament are structural problems in the U.S. economy, such as widespread job displacement, declining real wages, and rising housing and health-care costs. As a result, many in the middle class rely on credit cards as “a way of warding off complete disaster,” until they exhaust this avenue, and unpaid credit card debt continues to pile up.78 The framing of a number of articles, including Herbert’s, about the middleclass squeeze reflects the content of published government reports or wellreceived books that highlight the “gloom and doom” of the middle class.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

Growth in nonagricultural employment fell from 3.3% under Carter to 1%. Employment in manufacturing fell by 0. 7 million in contrast to an increase of 1.3 million under Carter. The unemployment rate in 1984 was higher than the average for any year of the Carter Administration, and would have been higher still had the growth in the labor force not declined. Real wages continued their decline at a rate faster than in the Carter years while the share of government spending in the national product rose. Inflation dropped, with about one-third to one-half of the reduction a result of the leveling off of petroleum prices, much of the rest attributable to the assault on labor and the Reagan-induced recession, which had a serious impact elsewhere as well, particularly for the “developing countries.”


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Outstanding debt levels, growing gradually since the World War II, exploded as consumers borrowed as they had for generations, but, for the first time, found themselves unable to pay back what they borrowed. While the amount of outstanding debt tripled from 1970 to 1979, the gap between what was loaned and what was repaid increased seven times, to $35 billion a year.204 Everywhere, in the face of uncertainty and declining real wages, Americans indebted themselves to maintain the life they had once been able to afford. Chapter Seven Securing Debt in an Insecure World CREDIT CARDS AND CAPITAL MARKETS In 1978, Donald Auriemma, then the vice-president of Chemical Bank’s personal loan department, doubted the wisdom of Citibank’s aggressive expansion into the credit card business that had begun a few years earlier.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And once again there is neither the push nor the pull to move people to new sectors: higher costs of education make it difficult for people to obtain the skills they need for jobs that would pay a wage comparable to their old wage; and among the sectors where there might have been growth, low demand from the recession creates few vacancies. The result is stagnant, or even declining, real wages. As recently as 2007, the base wage of an autoworker was around $28 an hour. Now, under a two-tier wage system agreed upon with the United Automobile Workers union, new hires can expect to earn only about $15 an hour.13 Back to the role of government This broad narrative of what has happened to the market and the contribution of market forces to increasing inequality ignores the role that government plays in shaping the market.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But output per worker was lower during this period since less output was demanded in a recession than in normal times. Since the 2008 crisis, output per worker grew at just 0.2 per cent per year, which is a fraction of the 2.1 per cent average growth rate between 1972 and 2007. Wage flexibility helped to maintain jobs during the latest recession, a decline in real wages making it possible to keep people in work.9 Employers hoarding workers instead of laying them off doesn’t explain the entire productivity puzzle.10 Part of the answer may be that the British economy has a large services sector in which it is difficult to measure either investment or output accurately.11 But the US also has a large services sector and doesn’t suffer from the productivity problem to the same extent, so mismeasurement is unlikely to be the whole story either.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But output per worker was lower during this period since less output was demanded in a recession than in normal times. Since the 2008 crisis, output per worker grew at just 0.2 per cent per year, which is a fraction of the 2.1 per cent average growth rate between 1972 and 2007. Wage flexibility helped to maintain jobs during the latest recession, a decline in real wages making it possible to keep people in work.9 Employers hoarding workers instead of laying them off doesn’t explain the entire productivity puzzle.10 Part of the answer may be that the British economy has a large services sector in which it is difficult to measure either investment or output accurately.11 But the US also has a large services sector and doesn’t suffer from the productivity problem to the same extent, so mismeasurement is unlikely to be the whole story either.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

America either just narrowly survived its first brush with actual fascism, or we just learned that, yes, it can happen here. Either way, we believe that the rules in this book provide some of the answers for the struggle ahead. No matter who wins in 2016, the revolution is here. In democracies, people do not accept decline forever. Real wages have been falling for forty years. Our maternal mortality rate has fallen behind every developed nation in the world and many developing nations. Forty percent of Americans will live below the poverty line at some point in their lives. Tens of millions of children who grew up in middle class homes are finding themselves firmly in the working class.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Today the median wage for people in the working class aged twenty-five to sixty-four is $1.30 less per hour than it was in 1980 ($15.61, down from $16.91).29 Still, looking at the working class as an undifferentiated whole hides very important distinctions by gender, race, and age. Like American society more generally, there’s a hierarchy of earnings. Working-class men still outearn all other demographic groups in the working class, despite a nearly $5-per-hour decline in real wages over the past three decades. Today the median hourly wage for working-class men is $17.56, down from $22.04 in 1980. The white working class makes significantly more than any other demographic group, thanks in large part to the higher wages of men. As Table 2 shows, hourly wages for most workers have been stagnant over the past three decades, with modest increases for women and only significant declines for men.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

In Kinshasa, writes Theodore Trefon, "the population refers to basic public services as 'memories.'"12 The balance sheet of structural adjustment in Africa, reviewed by Carole Rakodi, includes capital flight, collapse of manufactures, marginal or negative increase in export incomes, drastic cutbacks in urban public services, soaring prices, and a steep decline in real wages.13 Across the continent people learned to say "I have the crisis" in the same way one says, "I have a cold."14 In Dar-es-Salaam, public-service expenditure per person fell 10 percent per annum during the 1980s, a virtual demolition of the local state.15 In Khartoum, liberalization and 11 Challenge, p. 48. 12 Theodore Trefon, "Introduction: Reinventing Order," in Trefon, Reinventing Order in the Congo, p. 1. 13 Rakodi, "Global Forces, Urban Change, and Urban Management i n Africa," in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, pp. 50, 60-61. 14 Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, "Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis," in Enwezor et al., Under Siege, p. 112. 15 Michael Mattingly, "The Role of the Government of Urban Areas in the Creation of Urban Poverty," in Sue Jones and Nici Nelson (eds), Urban Poverty in Africa: From Understanding to Alleviation, London 1999, p. 21.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

This issue has dogged economics since the early industrial revolution, when data first began to appear regarding wages and productivity and inspired a series of famous (among economists) debates during the 1880s: Alfred Marshall faced down enthusiasts of Henry George and John Stuart Mill, who believed that competition among workers always had the potential to cause stagnating or declining real wages regardless of rising productivity. Marshall demurred.10 Armed with decades of statistics from the era of labor shortages created by the industrial revolution then driving up real wages, Marshall argued that private property and competition were succeeding in raising wages where socialism could not.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The party has been accused of carrying out acts of violence against immigrants, political opponents, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities.53 The 2007–2013 financial crisis had destabilizing effects on Greece: a large share of the professional middle class employed in the public sector experienced declining real wages and loss of job security. This country has also been at the forefront of a massive influx of sea-­borne immigrants and refugees seeking to escape conflict and extreme poverty in Syria, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia, through the route across the Mediterranean. Similarly, in Spain, the rise of Podemos, founded in March 2014 by Pablo Iglesias as a progressive populist party, has been widely interpreted as a response to economic conditions, including the Eurozone debt crisis and the subsequent recession, problems of corruption and inequality, and record levels of youth unemployment.54 In the December 20, 2015 parliamentary elections, Podemos surged to receive 21 percent of the vote, 152 Economic Grievances becoming Spain’s third largest party in parliament, with 69 out of 350 seats.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

It was, therefore, an icon of middle-class rather than working-class unionism. The effect on the condition of labour across the board was dramatic—perhaps best captured by the fact that the Federal minimum wage, which stood on a par with the poverty level in 1980, had fallen to 30 per cent below that level by 1990. The long decline in real wage levels then began in earnest. Reagan’s appointments to positions of power on issues such as environmental regulation, occupational safety, and health, took the campaign against big government to ever higher levels. The deregulation of everything from airlines and telecommunications to finance opened up new zones of untrammelled market freedoms for powerful corporate interests.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

He was strong in cosmopolitan cities, while Le Pen was strong in small towns and rural areas that felt abandoned. Le Pen took nine of the ten départements with France’s highest unemployment rates. What happened in France looks much like what happened in the UK and the United States. Lesseducated whites living outside the big cities, who had been hurt by economic decline, falling real wages, unemployment, under-employment, and a lack of good jobs, voted for populism. Once again, they were against immigration, from outside the big cities, which have prospered, and the rule of the elites. This time right-wing populism lost. There isn’t going to be a Frexit, but election winner Sebastian Kurz is president of Austria, and his party is in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), suggesting that the French election may not be a turning point.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Cheaper goods and services and increased consumer choice came at the cost of displaced workers in developed countries. While it helped improve living standards in emerging nations, the influx of around 1.5 billion additional workers into the global economy reduced the bargaining power of employees in developed markets, ushering in declines in real wages. Ironically, China's new socialism did not unite the workers of the world, but divided them, triggering “the profoundest global reshuffle of people's economic positions since the Industrial Revolution.”4 Automation increased both corporate profits and income inequality. Apple's ubiquitous i-gadgets consist of components made in multiple countries and assembled in China, with the supply chain being managed in the US by Apple, which earns around 30–50 percent of the final price.


pages: 318 words: 93,502

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Calculated from The State of Working America 2002-2003, Table 1.32, Annual Hours, Wives in Prime-Age, Married-Couple Families with Children, and Contributions to Change, 1979-2000, Sorted by Husband’s Income. 58 Coontz, The Way We Never Were, p. 168. 59 Chris McComb, “Few Say It’s Ideal for Both Parents to Work Full Time Outside of Home,” Gallup News Service, April 20-22, 2001. 60 Both women and men who did not finish high school saw declines in real wages over the past twenty years. By contrast, among college graduates, women’s earnings have increased 30 percent since 1979, while men’s earnings have increased by 17 percent. U.S. Department of Labor, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2000,” Report 952, August 2001, Table 15, Median Usual Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers 25 and Over in Constant (2000) Dollars, by Sex and Educational Attainment, 1979-2000 Annual Averages. 61 Median earnings, which are the best measure of middle-class wages, have risen less than 1 percent for men since the early 1970s, while women’s earnings have increased by more than one-third.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The value of this information in the labor market has increased markedly. The difference between the average wage for people with a bachelor’s degree and people with only a high school diploma doubled between 1977 and 2005, even as the supply of diploma bearers increased substantially. This occurred in part because of skill-biased technology change and the decline in real wages for low-skill workers. College credentials have also been locked in place as a required part of many large professions. Teachers, for example: There are 3.7 million elementary, middle, and high school teachers in America. Almost every one of them has a bachelor’s degree, and nearly half have a master’s degree.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

And it accelerates the privatization of aspirations, dissolving the sense of solidarity and sympathy, and other human values that were at the heart of classical liberal thought but are inconsistent with the reigning ideology of privilege and power. More narrowly, the US Labor Department estimates that weakening of unions accounts for a large part of the stagnation or decline in real wages under the Reaganites, “a welcome development of transcendent importance,” as the Wall Street Journal described the fall in labor costs from the 1985 high to the lowest in the industrial world (UK aside).55 Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in February 1997, Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan was highly optimistic about “sustainable economic expansion” thanks to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity,” plainly a desideratum for a good society and yet another reason for Western relativists to reject Article 25 of the UD, with its “right to security.”


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deskilling, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, language acquisition, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, theory of mind, Tobin tax, Turing test

Morgan as compared with the ‘stunning’ profit increase of 54 per cent for the 500 with a mere 2.6 per cent increase of employment and 8.2 per cent sales gain in ‘one of the most profitable years ever for American business’, as Fortune reported exultantly. The business press hailed another ‘banner year for U.S. corporate profits’, while ‘U.S. household wealth seems to have actually fallen’ in this fourth straight year of double-digit profit growth and fourteenth straight year of decline in real wages. The Fortune 500 have attained new heights of ‘economic might’, with revenues close to two-thirds of gross domestic product, a good bit more than Germany or Britain, not to speak of their power over the global economy—an impressive concentration of power in unaccountable private tyrannies, and another welcome blow against democracy and markets.19 We live in ‘lean and mean times’, and everyone has to tighten their belts; so the mantra goes.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Further “green shoots” include enough repression to keep working people in line and attractive state subsidies for Western investors. These market reforms would enable Europe to “hammer away at high wages and corporate taxes, short working hours, labor immobility, and luxurious social programs.” Europe would be able to follow the American pattern, where the decline of real wages in the Reagan years to the lowest level among the advanced industrial societies (apart from Britain) was “a welcome development of transcendent importance.” With Communism’s ruins playing something like the role of Mexico, the advantages can now be brought to Western Europe as well, driving it toward the US-British model.2 Communism’s ruins have many advantages over the regions that have been under unbroken Western domination for centuries.


pages: 290 words: 98,699

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle by Phil Laut, Andy Fuehl

Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business process, buy and hold, declining real wages, fear of failure, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, index card, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce

This chapter offers a brief historical perspective of today’s economic conditions to inspire you with a sense of urgency. F igure 2.1 presents a startling graph showing the purchasing power of the average weekly wage income of the American worker, adjusted for inflation, since 1959. Here you can see the gradual decline in real wages since 1973. (Real wages are adjusted for inflation and thus reflect purchasing power.) Despite the fact that current dollar wages have been increasing, these gains have been outstripped by inflation since 1973, resulting in a gradual decline of purchasing power of about 1 percent per year. People are earning a little more each year, but each year it buys a little less.


pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Bandy Lee It is pretty clear what is responsible for the rise of the support for Trump, and there is general agreement about it. If you take a simple look at economic statistics, much of the support for Trump is coming from mostly white, working-class people who have been cast by the wayside during the neoliberal period. They have lived through a generation of stagnation or decline—real male wages are about where they were in the 1960s. There has also been a decline in a functioning democracy, overwhelming evidence that their own elected officials barely reflect their interests and concerns. Contempt for institutions, especially Congress, has just skyrocketed. Meanwhile, there has of course been wealth created.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

Even if that now counts East Germans, it’s still astonishing, when in the U.S. we’ve seen our own United Auto Workers and Steelworkers practically disappear. At least there is still a membership that can march. While the Germans may have held back on wage increases at various times, look at the steady decline of real wages in the U.S. From 1973 to 2005, productivity in America went up approximately 55 percent. Put another way, output per hour went up 55 percent. Meanwhile, the average hourly wage dropped 8 percent! Harvard’s Richard Freeman, perhaps our leading labor economist, once wrote: “If in 1973 any economist had predicted such a pattern, the American Economic Association would have carted him or her off as mad.”


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Exactly so, say the critics of immigration.5 Having more workers to compete with at home, like having more cheap workers abroad, or more robots, can certainly reduce wages, at least in principle. Whether they have done so is the crucial question. To explain the collapse of the working-class labor market, we are looking for factors that might be responsible for a half-century decline in real wages for less educated Americans. Given this, when we think about immigration and jobs, we need to distinguish immediate and longer-term effects. Suppose that the number of jobs is inflexible over a short time period of months or even years; this is the worst possible case for the wages of those already here.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Automation, offshoring, and import competition from China have also impacted other advanced economies, but in more nuanced forms. Collective bargaining did not decline as much in most of Europe. In the Nordic countries, union coverage has remained high. Not coincidentally, even though their inequality levels also increased, they did not experience the declines in real wages that have been such a major part of US labor market trends. In Germany, as we will see, companies often shifted workers from blue-collar occupations into new tasks, charting a somewhat different, more labor-friendly direction of technology. In France, too, minimum wages and unions have limited the rise in inequality, albeit at the cost of greater joblessness.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

This effect will not be important for groups or occupations in which people are relatively well paid, so that there are few people below the minimum, but it will be important in low-wage areas, in low-wage occupations, or among groups, such as women or African-Americans, whose wages are relatively low.22 If the erosion of the minimum wage since the 1970s has been partly responsible for the overall decline in real wages among low-wage workers, why didn’t politics stop it from happening? One reason is the decline of labor unions, especially in the private sector. The fraction of private-sector workers who were union members declined from 24 percent in 1973 to only 6.6 percent in 2012. Although the unionization of public-sector workers increased in the 1970s, it has been stagnant since 1979; the majority of union members are now in the public sector.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

“The Debt Crisis”; Caffentzis, “The Fundamental Implications”; Terisa E. Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill, “African Jubilee: Mau Mau Resurgence and the Fight for Fertility in Kenya, 1986-2001,” in Commons, special issue, Canadian Canadian Journal of Development Studies 22, eds. Terisa E. Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill. 21. Witness the dramatic decline in the “real wage” and the increase in the rate of poverty in Nigeria. Once considered a “middle income” country, Nigeria now has 70 percent of its population living on less than one U.S. dollar a day, and 90 percent on less than two U.S. dollars a day (UN Development Program statistics from its website). 22.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Other places in that bottom-ten list, like Detroit or Trenton, have other problems, like crime and unemployment. Real wages—incomes corrected for local prices—are an effective tool for assessing urban amenities. If places have unusually low real wages, then quality of life must be high. If places have unusually high real wages, then something is wrong with those places. Somewhat paradoxically, the decline in real wages in places like New York provides us with the best evidence that, all in all, big-city amenities have become more valuable. In 1970, there was a strong positive relationship between city size and real wages. Real wages increased by 3 percent as area population doubled. The same relationship also held in 1980.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Such price hawks are convinced that the U.S. economy cannot grow at a rate faster than 2.5 to 3.0 percent a year—quite slow by historical standards—without lapsing into a sickly inflation. If unemployment gets too low, meaning much below current levels, then workers might develop an attitude problem, and the twenty-year decline in real hourly wages might be reversed, however briefly. Wall Street wants the slow-growth, high-unemployment days of the early 1990s back again, and the Fed seems intent on fulfilling those wishes. But wish fulfillment may not come so easily. History shows that once an economic expansion is under way, it often takes far more sustained and sharp increases in interest rates to slow it down than anyone guesses at first.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Japan’s thirty glorious years, which were more glorious than Europe’s and America’s, were followed by the “Lost Decades.” Indeed, Japan has suffered one of the longest economic crises in history. Its economy actually shrank by a fifth between 1995 and 2007. Part of this came from falling prices and a declining workforce, but real wages did fall by 5 percent. Despite the economic hard times, the Japanese people are pro-globalization. A recent Pew Research poll found that 58 percent of Japanese agreed that involvement in the global economy “is a good thing because it provides Japan with new markets and opportunities for growth.”


The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money by John Maynard Keynes

bank run, behavioural economics, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, delayed gratification, full employment, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, marginal employment, means of production, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

For it may be the case that the practical workings of the laws of imperfect competition in the modern quasi-competitive system are such that, when output increases and money wages rise, prices rise less than in proportion to the increase in marginal money cost. It is scarcely likely, perhaps, that the narrowing gap could be sufficient to prevent a decline in real wages in a phase in which marginal real cost was increasing rapidly. But it might be sufficient to offset the effect on real wages of a modest rise in marginal real cost, and even to dominate the situation in the event of the marginal real cost curve proving to be almost horizontal over a substantial portion of its relevant length.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“That’s fucked-up,” she said, downing a shot of Jameson. “We put our value in technology jobs and forget those who built things. We treat them as inferior. If we continue that, our country is fucked.” The facts are on Haimerl’s side. In America and other industrialized nations, job creation has been steadily declining, along with real wages (on an inflation-adjusted basis). The GDP per person is down, inequality is up, and labor’s share of capital (the percentage of GDP that goes to workers) has steadily eroded. For all its wealth creation and gains, the digital economy, as it stands, has not delivered any substantive gains in employment and wages.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

In 1903, a priest named Father Georgi Gapon succeeded in forming the Assembly of Russian Workers. Within a year, it had more than nine thousand members. Gapon’s movement gathered momentum in 1904 when rapid inflation caused by the war against Japan (which had started in February) led to a 20 percent decline in real wages. When four members of the Assembly of Russian Workers Commitment Problems 141 were dismissed at the Putilov Iron Works, Gapon called for industrial action. Over the next few days, more than 110,000 workers in St. Petersburg went on strike. In an attempt to settle the dispute, Gapon made a personal appeal to Nicholas II and in January 1905 he drew up a petition outlining the workers’ sufferings and demands.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The twentieth-century income distribution system has broken down, as globalization has swept forward, as ‘neo-liberal’ economics has done its work, and as the technological revolution has facilitated transformative changes in labour markets. One outcome has been a growing ‘precariat’, consisting of millions of people facing unstable, insecure labour, a lack of occupational identity, declining and increasingly volatile real wages, loss of benefits and chronic indebtedness. The shares of national income going to ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ used to be roughly stable; that old consensus has gone. We are in a Second Gilded Age, in which more and more income is going to a minority of ‘rentiers’ who are thriving from the proceeds of property – physical, financial and ‘intellectual’.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The Global Minotaur metaphor crept up on me in 2002, after endless conversations with friend, colleague and co-author Joseph Halevi. Our discussions on what made the world tick after the 1970s’ economic crises produced a coherent, albeit complex, view of the global economic system in which America’s deficits, Wall Street and the ever-declining real value of American wages, played a defining and, paradoxically, a hegemonic role. The gist of our argument was that the defining characteristic of the post-1971 era was a reversal of the flow of trade and capital surpluses between the United States and the rest of the world. The hegemon, for the first time in world history, strengthened its hegemony by wilfully enlarging its deficits.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Fuller avoided this issue, which allowed his corporate sponsors to see him as provocative but unthreatening, and by portraying politicians as irrelevant, he implicitly absolved them of responsibility. He praised automation as a liberating force, but in the absence of social policy reform, it has led to layoffs, dehumanizing work, and a decline in real wages. The true design-science revolution depends on a culture that commits first to caring for its entire population, and not the other way around. This is the exact opposite of what Fuller claimed, largely because his career demanded it, but the evidence is overwhelming. Between the Green Revolution, Moore’s Law, and advances in energy efficiency, the accelerating breakthroughs that he predicted have come to pass, but instead of enabling mankind to make logical choices, they have deepened existing divides.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Maurizio Lazzarato, an Italian sociologist, has depicted ‘an indebted subjectivity’ – a sense of facing infinite debt that feeds into a psyche of nervousness and social passivity.6 Among the causes of mass indebtedness is a historically unique situation: people are trying to maintain a past living standard in the context of declining and more volatile real wages. Since the establishment of capitalism, society has been conditioned to expect that each generation will have a higher average standard of living than its predecessors. This is no longer the case. Our perceived needs are formed by our life experience, by the living standard attained by our parents and our peers, who set the income and consumption aspirations of each generation.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Hardisty and Clarkson each underscore the essential distinction between the followers of the New Right, who are struggling with legitimate concerns, and the leaders of the New Right, who manipulate those concerns for political advantage.19 226 PART III: AMERIC A, THE UNFINISHED PROJECT Exploiting Family Breakdown The New Right has been brilliantly successful in restoring the imperial status quo in relations between the owning and the working classes. Since 1983, nearly all the gains from economic growth have gone to the very richest Americans as union membership has declined and the real wages of working people have fallen. As the wages of a typical male worker fell below the level required to support a family, women who earlier had begun to experience a new sense of freedom found that workplace participation was no longer a choice but a necessity. Many were forced into jobs paying less than a living wage.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Raising a consumption tax Â�will tend to boost prices and thereby reduce real wages. Why would the relative scarcities and bargaining powers that boost the cost of Â�labor if workers’ incomes are taxed more not also operate as a result of a higher taxation of their consumption? Why would the supply of Â�labor be affected by a decline in marginal real wages if caused by lower postÂ�tax wages and not if caused by higher prices? If Â�there is a systematic difference in impact on the cost of Â�labor and work incentives between funding through VAT and funding through income tax, therefore, it can only be to the extent that VAT manages de facto to capture a broader spectrum of incomes at the point of spending than income tax does at the point of earning.61 Â�There is no fundamental reason for rejecting a VAT or another form of sales tax as a way of funding a basic income, but no fundamental reason for adopting it, Â�either.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

Devaluations also cause assets to rise in value when measured in local currency, and they attract capital from abroad as a country’s financial assets become cheaper in global currency terms. From July 1919 through March 1920, the decline in the mark and negative real rates provided a boost to the German economy and its equity and commodity markets. The export industry also thrived, unemployment declined, and as real wages remained low, business profitability improved. You can see the decline in unemployment and the pickup in exports in the charts below. (Note that all unemployment statistics from the time only show unemployment among trade union members, so they likely understate the true amount of unemployment and hardship in German society.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

On the other hand, as surplus capital moved ever more massively out of trade and production, the enterprises that either could not or chose not to move out of trade and production found themselves relieved of the competitive pressures that had been curtailing their profit margins. This relief materialized from the 1880s onward in a steady improvement in Britain’s terms of trade. But its most important manifestation was the overall decline of British real wages after the mid-1890s, which reversed the rapidly rising trend of the previous half-century (Saul 1969: 28-34; Barrat Brown 1974: table 14): Arguing . . . in terms of the power of organized labor, it might be suggested that during the highly competitive environment of falling prices, unions were able to squeeze profits between stable wages and market-controlled prices. . . .


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Galbraith to invent the amusing and insightful concept of the "no-business meeting.")lO But it is possible-one cannot know for sure-that the meetings did have an important effect, ironically a harmful effect. From the employers attending his conferences the President extracted a promise not to cut wages any faster than the cost of living declined. He believed that real wage cuts, besides being unfair and productive of strife, would reduce consumer purchasing power and thereby exacerbate the recession. Whether because of fidelity to the President or for other reasons, many employers did not reduce money wages much until well into 1931. Meanwhile deflation proceeded apace.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management


pages: 775 words: 208,604

pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game