To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply extracting value created by others – was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. However, ever since neoclassical economics replaced classical economics as the dominant school of thinking in the late 19th century, economic rent has been increasingly marginalised from economic discourse. To the extent that it is acknowledged, it is usually viewed as being peripheral to the story of wealth...
Read More »Michael Roberts — Socialism and the White House
The Trump White House research team have issued a very strange report. It’s called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,”. It purports to prove that ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’ policies would be damaging to Americans because the ‘opportunity costs’ of socialism compared to capitalism are so much higher. What is strange and rather amusing is that the White House advisers to Trump deem it necessary to explain to Americans the failures of ‘socialism’ in 2018. But when you delve into the...
Read More »James Petras — Big Business Strikes Back: The Class Struggle from Above
IntroductionBankers, agro-business elites, commercial mega owners, manufacturing, real estate and insurance bosses and their financial advisers, elite members of the ‘ruling class’, have launched a full-scale attack on private and public wage and salary workers,and small and medium size entrepreneurs (the members of the ‘popular classes’). The attack has targeted income ,pensions, medical plans, workplace conditions, job security, rents, mortgages, educational costs, taxation,undermining...
Read More »David F. Ruccio — Sciences of inequality
Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States). The numbers for...
Read More »Daniel José Camacho — Can We Afford Economic Justice In The United States?
If the government is not as broke as some say it is, then the inability to invest in things like public education is due to a lack of political will and not some natural law written into the fabric of economic reality. SojournersCan We Afford Economic Justice In The United States? Daniel José Camacho | Associate Web Editor
Read More »Zero Hedge — US Workers Only Receiving A Fraction Of Corporate Tax Cuts
What a surprise.Zero HedgeUS Workers Only Receiving A Fraction Of Corporate Tax Cuts Tyler Durden
Read More »David Ruccio and Jamie Morgan — Capital and class: inequality after the crash
The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even...
Read More »Jayati Ghosh — The Real Problem with Free Trade
Even if free trade is ultimately broadly beneficial, the fact remains that as trade has become freer, inequality has worsened. One major reason for this is that current global trade rules have enabled a few large firms to capture an ever-larger share of value-added, at a massive cost to economies, workers, and the environment.... The only significant exception to these trends is China, which has designed industrial policies specifically to increase the share of domestic value-added and to...
Read More »Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez. Gabriel Zucman — Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States
This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects...
Read More »David F. Ruccio — “Don’t class warfare me”
Don't celebrate the recent expansion yet. The economic numbers look good — until adjusted for inflation.The real wage is falling. Workers are becoming worse off economically in real terms even with nominal wages improving somewhat but not substantially. They falling further behind than they were before the expansion in terms of purchasing power.Occasional Links & Commentary“Don’t class warfare me”David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame
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