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from David Ruccio Over the years, I’ve reproduced and created many different charts representing the spectacular rise of inequality in the United States during the past four decades. Here’s the latest—based on the work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman—which, according to David Leonhardt, “captures the rise in inequality better than any other chart or simple summary that I’ve seen.”   I agree. The chart shows the different rates of change in income between 1980 and...

I found a piece from two years ago on the notoriously far right, alt-right Public Broadcasting Service website entitled Column: Why the STEM gender gap is overblown by Denise Cummins, a research psychologist. She begins by noting that men don’t outnumber women in all areas of STEM, and she provides this graph: (Click to embiggen.) She then goes on: At the Ph.D. level, women have clearly achieved equity in the biosciences and social sciences, are nearly...

from Steve Pressman As the rich received a bigger piece of the pie, everyone else got relatively less. We can see this in the falling share of income going to the middle-three income quintiles (Figure 1). One standard economic argument for great inequality is that it generates incentives to make money and contributes to economic growth, which increases average living standards. Even if this is true, not everyone benefits from growth. Saez and Piketty (2013) estimate that since the late...

According to the latest figures, 93.3% of federal prisoners are men. The male to female incarceration rate is also wildly lopsided in state and county facilities, and to my knowledge, pretty much everywhere else in the world. I also am unable to think of a single example where there is reason to believe that women outnumber men in jails and prisons. Furthermore, I don’t see any particular reason why incarcerated men will not continue to outnumber...

from Lars Syll The loanable funds theory is in many regards nothing but an approach where the ruling rate of interest in society is — pure and simple — conceived as nothing else than the price of loans or credits set by banks and determined by supply and demand — as Bertil Ohlin put it — “in the same way as the price of eggs and strawberries on a village market.” It’s a beautiful fairy tale, but the problem is that banks are not barter institutions that transfer pre-existing loanable...

from David Ruccio [ht: ja] describes the arrival of the first robots at Tenere Inc. in Dresser, Wisconsin: The workers of the first shift had just finished their morning cigarettes and settled into place when one last car pulled into the factory parking lot, driving past an American flag and a “now hiring” sign. Out came two men, who opened up the trunk, and then out came four cardboard boxes labeled “fragile.” “We’ve got the robots,” one of the men said. They watched as a forklift...

So the Fed is failing to meet its inflation target, wage growth remains weak, and all measures of credit expansion have been decelerating for more than 6 months: Highlights Consumer prices remain very soft, failing to match what were modest Econoday expectations for July. Total prices edged 1 tenth higher in July as did the core (less food & energy) which are both no better than the low estimates. Year-on-year rates are also at the low estimates, at 1.7 percent each....

Atlantic: An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo Esquire: This Is Pure, Unadulterated American Crazy Foreign Policy: Here’s the Memo that Blew Up the NSC Mother Jones:You Should Read the “Maoist Insurgency” Memo. It’s Bananas Wonkette: Of Course Trump Loves This Fucking Bonkers NSC Memo Calling For Civil War Back in 2011 after mass murderer Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people in Norway I had a look at his “manifesto” because I  had...

from Dean Baker The prescription drug industry ranks as one of the most dysfunctional sectors of the US economy. Martin Shkreli has made himself a celebrity as the “pharma bro”: a hedge fund boy who jacked up prices on drugs produced by a company he controlled by more than 5,000 percent. Unfortunately, this sort of pricing is typical of the industry, even if most companies tend to be a bit less flamboyant in profiting off patients than Mr. Shkreli. The underlying problem is that drug...