Culture

The “War on Poverty,” and the impact of public policy

Pursuing equality while growing the economy requires reframing social spending as a form of investment.

A transition from the conventional policy of “redistributing income” to “redistributing membership”, could promote economic integration across communities and intergenerational mobility.

Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book

To mark International Women’s Day, Neva Goodwin argues that the crisis of income insecurity and longstanding gender inequality require a form of universal basic income that recognizes and rewards the value of household labor

Policies based on faith in the “market” as a principle of social organization have wrought havoc with a founding principle of American democracy

A reference guide to all Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) community presentations at the Eastern Economic Association’s (EEA) 2017 annual meeting

Stanford economic historian Professor Gavin Wright, addressing the Institute’s conference on the economics of race, argues that the conditions facing the children of the great migration from the South are very different to the conditions for the children of those who stayed behind. 

A presentation from The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy, the first annual conference of The Center for Information and Bubble Studies (CIBS) at The University of Copenhagen

Young Scholars from the YSI working groups on Innovation, Complexity Economics, Philosophy of Economics and Financial Stability will present their research at a one-day workshop following The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Professor Tchen explores the many layers of “otherness” at work in America’s political economy

Professor Temin sees the US economy as bifurcated along lines analogous to the situation described in developing world economies by W. Arthur Lewis.

A Speaker Series for the Greater Philadelphia Region

Presented by Professor Dan O’Flaherty at the Institute’s conference on the economics of race in Detroit on 11 November, 2016

Riots, lynchings and other forms of violence dramatically disproportionate impact on the lives and prospects of African inventors. That’s just one indicator, says Professor Lisa Cook, of the profound impact of racial violence on the economic structure

Extract from the keynote speech by the Rev. Dr. William Barber III at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference on race and economics in Detroit on November 11

Professor Marlene Kim provided a riveting picture, via her personal family history of the exploitation of the Asian-American working-class in California. She challenged the invisibility of Asian-Americans in discussions of race in America, and also focused on the double burden of discrimination borne by women of color.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza, addressing the Institute’s Detroit conference on the economics of race, placed the turmoil created by the 2016 election in the context of a backlash against the gains made by social movements challenging racial and social injustice. She argued that those movements now need, more than ever, “to show up for one another” at a local level to protect those gains

What Donald Trump does well, Professor john a. powell explains, is link economic concerns with ontological and racial concerns among his voters. Many economists and social justice activists, by contrast, try to reduce racial concerns to economic and class concerns. His presentation demonstrates the centrality, conscious or unconscious, of belonging and ‘otherness’ in comprehending the structures of society.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking’s recent Detroit event on race and economics noted both the structural impediments faced by African-Americans, and the impressive gains made in some communities despite those headwinds

On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws related to employment. The expectation was that African Americans would be prime beneficiaries of the EEOC.

Columbia professor Dan O’Flaherty explains how an awareness of racial trauma developed from growing up in Newark inspired him to write and teach on the economics of race.

How economics underperforms in diversity, and some potential remedies

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, shares a vision of how to bring economic opportunity to women of color

This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979- 2014.

In his keynote address to our #EconOfRace conference in Detroit, Rev. Dr. William Barber III issued a blistering critique of structural inequality in the United States, and urged economists to recognize their responsibility to the poor.

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economics has a race problem.

Prof. Marlene Kim says her research has revealed that African-American women face triple penalties from race and gender bias, and the combination of those two

Getting rid of barriers to economic security is possible with the right policies at the right time. 

Language has always been a way to divide, conquer, classify, and control, but it also helps to constitute who we are and what we think. 

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economist Darrick Hamilton and Institute President Rob Johnson discuss “stratification economics”, which addresses the failure of orthodox economics to see, explain and point to remedies for persistent racial inequality.

Black Americans remain second-class citizens in access to housing finance

Young women of all races and gender identities are powering movements from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform to reproductive justice to minimum wage and beyond. Researchers need to support their progress with metrics that capture the spirit they are building

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Wired profiles Color of Change leader Rashad Robinson and explores the challenges of movement-building in an era of digital activism

Historian Prof. Thomas Sugrue offers a critique of the conventional wisdom that roots the city’s fate in the racial tension of the tumultuous ‘60s and the decline of the auto industry.

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs.

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

William Darity, Jr. has a new key to unlocking the mystery of inequality: stratification economics.

A new paper by Nancy Folbre offers an evidence-based refutation of ‘just-world’ assumptions

Marc Levin highlights the recent effects of hyper-gentrification in New York City’s West Chelsea, focusing on an intersection where an elite private school sits directly across the street from public housing projects.

Research by INET grantees Atkinson, Casarico and Voitchovsky shows that women are starkly underrepresented in top earning brackets across a range of different countries

If additional education is not the solution to racial inequality, what is?

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

Remarks by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde remind us why gender remains a major research and policy focus for the Fund — and for the Institute for New Economic Thinking

Renewed attention on America’s stark and growing racial wealth divide requires critical thinking on policy remedies

In the past month, analysts from all disciplines have tried to make sense out of shooting deaths of blacks by police and also ambush attacks of police.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Roland Fryer’s working paper on police use of force, prompted by this thread by Europile and excellent posts by Michelle Phelps and Ezekeil Kweku.

Frank Dikötter explores previously classified Chinese leadership documents, and attempts to set the record straight.

Pernicious cultural norms inside American banks and regulatory agencies have crowded out fundamental moral principles. Ed Kane proposes an antidote.

What we’re reading: A weekly scan of published items relevant to the Institute’s work

Does the technology revolution require a new social policy?

European Union countries are facing an epic challenge of integrating more than 1 million refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and beyond.

Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is Professor Emirita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has written extensively about the economics of care and reciprocity.

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Professor Casarico explains why her focus on gender and the “glass ceiling” can help us push forward economic thinking.

Since Aristotle the question about the potential relationship between economic inequality and democratic changes has been studied and debated – but scientifically our ability as researchers to assess and understand how such complex social phenomena may be related is much more limited than recognised.

Can education stop the country’s backward slide?

The United States economy has come apart, with the rich getting richer and workers’ incomes not advancing at all.

Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

News about a wonderful workshop, “Knowledge Transfer and Its Contexts”

Economist Alicia Girón explains why a feminist perspective is crucial to new economic thinking.

Literary productions offer illustrations of economic theory in action.

Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.

Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?

How do we create a “change in culture”?

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde joined a renowned group of globally influential women in discussing how the financial system can be re-imagined to truly benefit society.

Whilst progress has been made, the “glass ceiling” dividing men and women has yet to be broken definitively. Monika Queisser discusses the challenges still facing women in the workplace and beyond.

Most sociologists believe that formal and informal institutions are more critical in explaining the rising inequality observed in advanced economies. In this light, changing institutions such as the ascendance of shareholder-centered corporate governance model, finance-friendly policies since the late 70s, credentialism, and deunionization all contribute to the earnings dynamics at different parts of the distribution.

Gudrun Johnsen on Iceland, “womenomics”, and Finance & Society

This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

This paper will address the problem of how we might gain economic understanding from literature. It will look at the aesthetic form of literature as being an efficient vehicle for economic thinking.

This paper studies the glass ceiling by analyzing the presence of women at the top of the income distribution using tax record data reported for a sample of countries with individual taxation.

Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice.

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

The SSGAC is a research infrastructure designed to stimulate dialogue and cooperation between medical researchers and social scientists. The SSGAC facilitates collaborative research that seeks to identify associations between specific genetic markers (segments of DNA) and behavioral traits, such as preferences, personality and social-science outcomes.

Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics” based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.”

It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.