Economic Policy

Champions of the U.S. economic system say that Europe’s generous social protections cause high unemployment. But it’s the global economy that’s driving up joblessness in Europe–just as it increases income inequality in the United States.

The great bull market of the 1990s has generated euphoria in millions of inexperienced investors and laid the groundwork for privatization of Social Security. But extensive poll data suggest that investor expectations are grossly unrealistic.

When two economists showed that a higher minimum wage would have little adverse effect on jobs, did the fast food industry try to spike the data and poison their reputations?

Redistributing income has always been difficult politics, but recent books propose a host of wealth-building ideas that may have some purchase even in today’s free market political environment. 

The International Monetary Fund casts itself as valiant superhero, swooping in to rescue troubled countries from self-inflicted financial disaster. In fact, the demands for austerity it has recently imposed on fundamentally sound economies in Asia and elsewhere have made their problems much worse.

F rom the early-nineteenth-century introduction of steam power through the dawning of the age of the microchip in the post-World War II era, real economic growth in America averaged 3.8 percent per year. That meant economic output doubled roughly every 19 years. Then after the 1970s, growth collapsed. During the 1980s, growth averaged just 2.7 […]

Working- and middle-class voters remain economically anxious. But in the absence of a convincing narrative that connects to their lives, many are concluding from their condition that the only remedy is rugged individualism.