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from David Ruccio One of the most pernicious myths in the United States is that higher education successfully levels the playing field across students with different backgrounds and therefore reduces wealth inequality. The reality is quite different—for the population as a whole and, especially, for racial and ethnic minorities.  As is clear from the chart above, the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent has risen dramatically since the mid-1970s, rising from 22.9 percent in 1976 to...

Extending (again) the extending-and-pretending Eurogroup policy on Greece’s never-ending crisis Back in August 2015, while sitting gloomily in the Greek Parliament during the sad, long night leading to the voting in of the 3rd MoU, I found solace in annotating the MoU’s text. Last night, I felt the need to repeat that wretched ritual once more, this time with the 15th June 2017 Eurogroup statement on Greece. (In...

These spiked up with the Presidential election and are only slowly coming back down: Muddling through at just over a 2% annual rate, but q2 looking weaker than q1: Highlights Forget about all the strength in the low sample-sized regional reports. Government data are not pointing to strength at all as manufacturing readings in the May industrial production report are a matter of concern. Industrial production could manage no better than an unchanged reading in May while the...

paperback now available from the Amazon pages listed below 508 pages Here are links to the book’s pages on the various AmazonsUnited States $28, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: Indigenous advocates from around the world are calling on a UN committee to make appropriating Indigenous cultures illegal — and to do it quickly. Delegates from 189 countries, including Canada, are in Geneva this week as part of a specialized international committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency. Here’s more: Speaking to the committee Monday, James Anaya, dean...

from Edward Fullbrook Scientific education entails taming the authority of one’s intuition.  Responsible citizenship in a democracy may entail it as well. Keynes argued that markets often create inaccurate expectations of economic reality which people then act upon thereby changing reality.   This reflexivity that Keynes identified as central to capitalist markets is the opposite of the basic process described by traditional economic theory, both in Keynes’ day and in our own, whereby it...

States tend to be pro cyclical. As tax collections slow, so does spending:

Highlights Consumer spending was unusually weak in the first quarter and doesn’t look to be improving this quarter. Retail sales fell 0.3 percent in May vs Econoday’s consensus for a 0.1 percent gain. Weakness riddles the report including a 1.0 percent drop for department stores, a 0.2 percent decline for autos, and a 0.1 percent dip for restaurants. Two readings that echo price contraction in this morning’s consumer price report are gasoline stations, down 2.4 percent, and...

from Lars Syll So in what sense is this “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” model firmly grounded in the principles of economic theory? I do not want to be misunderstood. Friends have reminded me that much of the effort of “modern macro” goes into the incorporation of important deviations from the Panglossian assumptions that underlie the simplistic application of the Ramsey model to positive macroeconomics. Research focuses on the implications of wage and price stickiness, gaps and...