For most Americans, according to official economic statistics, the 1990s were the best of times. Anne Lowry explains: This week, the Census Bureau came out with its big annual report on income and poverty in the United States, and it…
Yearly Archives: 2014
Economic “Recoveries” Are Not benefitting the Median American
Pavlina Tcherneva tweeted a graph last month showing how the macroeconomic policy has increasingly left behind 90% of Americans. @ptcherneva: I’d like to see the data that generated this graph because it has gotten a lot of attention and I’d…
How The Fed Could Help The People Rather Than The Banks
Foreign Affairs magazine recently published an article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan about how central banks should use “helicopter drops.” That means to increase the money supply by giving money directly to households rather than by loaning money by…
Doctors Don’t Put Up With Much Moral Hazard From Medicaid Patients
I teach health economics to medical professionals and every year many of them say they perceive greater moral hazard among Medicaid recipients than among the rest of us. I think this perception is partly due to the way the economics…
Popularizing Monetary Policy
Three community organizing groups have, “come together to try to do something that hasn’t really been done before: grassroots lobbying of the Fed.” The groups are Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, Action United in Philadelphia, and the Center for Popular Democracy and…
Inequality vs Unemployment: Similar Causes, But Different Cures
David Autor has a new paper that he presented at the Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week where he argues that labor-saving robots (and other new technologies) won’t raise unemployment. This has been a worry at least since the…
007 A License To Cut
Most US states require a license to cut hair. This is basically a way for the barbershop lobby to restrict competition and raise wages. This might be good for reducing American inequality because barbers are probably below the median wage…
Medianism 