The Great Recession is the culmination of policies which have the effect of screwing middle-class people who get the vast majority of their income via wages. I’m referring to policies and legislation which provide advantage capital over labor. While middle-class white people have gotten the shaft since the start of the Great Recession, middle-class African-Americans and Hispanics have gotten it much worse.
Category Archives: Economics
Walter Benn Michaels on neoliberalism
Neoliberal, n.: a liberal who de-emphasizes traditional liberal doctrines in order to seek progress by more pragmatic methods
From “Let Them Eat Diversity“:
The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things….
Chart of the Day
CPI = Consumer Price Index
hrly_wg = Change in hourly wages
hrs = Change in weekly hours worked
rl_wk = Real change in weekly earnings
Chart of the Day: 10 September 2015
Labor Day Must Listen: “Why Do We Work?”
One of the segments on WBUR’s On Point this morning, “Why Do We Work?” From the teaser:
We work to live, we live to work. Most of us lucky enough to have a job give most of our waking hours to our job. Why? Just for the paycheck? Our guest today says work for many of us is reduced to a paycheck, but what we yearn for is the right to work hard, to give to our job and our team and feel respect and self-respect.
I only caught about half of the segment but it was very good. The featured guest, Barry Schwartz, was no pollyanna. Yes, there will always be crap, deadbeats, etc. to deal with but, if we choose to, we can create work environments which defined by positive achievement rather than dealing with BS.
Two Three other Labor Day links:
- Mike the Mad Biologist, Republicans, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby
- Harold Meyerson, A Happy Labor Day – Really
- Anne Lamott, Instilling a love of unions
A chart for Labor Day
From a report by Josh Bivens and Larry Mishel that I linked to in last week’s Digest (but have only skimmed to date). Paul Krugman posted a nice top-level takeway yesterday evening. From his concluding paragraph:
…the next time you hear someone claiming that middle-class families have, in fact, seen a big rise in living standards, you should know that to the extent that this is true (which is less than claimed), it’s mainly about working more hours. Pay really has almost stagnated despite rising productivity.
Your forecasts: The evidence suggests that I should not take them seriously.
Rate on 10-Year Treasuries since 1995 (blue line) and economists’ forecasts from 1996, 2000, 2005, 2010 and this year (colored lines with year of forecast indicated):
(Source)
Chart for the Day: Getting Better, But Not Particularly Good
Charts for the Day – July 31, 2015
US personal saving rate since 1959:
It declined from about 1975 until 2008, i.e., the start of The Great Recession. There’s been a modest uptick since then but it’s still only about 40% of it’s peak. (I’m ignoring that brief spike to 17% ca 1975.) Now compare that with plots of worker productivity and compensation since 1949: Continue reading
Thought for the Day: 8 July 2015
If we are not going to try to make good policies–and are not willing to risk that the electorate will ultimately reward good policies–why are we here? If we are going to enact the bad policies of our political adversaries, why not just let them govern?