Inequality & Distribution

The YSI Keynesian Economics Working Group is co-hosting a PhD seminar at the Nordic Post-Keynesian Conference entitled “Economics at the Edge”.

In his 2017 presidential address to the National Economic Association, Professor Darrick Hamilton warned that treating economics as a morally neutral ‘science’, and the discipline’s limited attention to structural barriers and overemphasis individual agency, has resulted in bad economics, and bad policy particularly as it relates to racial disparity.

INET

Despite dismissive comments by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, facing the challenge posed by robotics replacing human labor raises key public policy questions 

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

In this comment, we explain our objections to the SEC’s current formulation of the Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule on each of three grounds: the erroneous estimation of CEO pay; the unclear specification of the “median” worker; and the risk of normalizing a pay ratio that is far too high. Then we present the latest data on the remuneration of the 500 highest-paid CEOs in the United States, demonstrating the way in which the SEC’s measure of CEO pay that enters into the CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio tends to systematically underestimate actual executive pay.

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. That is not to say that they don’t exist. They are created when employers or government agencies tamper with the natural functioning of the wage mechanism.

The health crisis afflicting working-class Americans recalls similar symptoms in Russia following the collapse of communism

Taxing the use of robotics may or may not be the answer, but the question remains how to compensate for the growing inequality created by our changing economies

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

In the age of Adam Smith, an economics that masqueraded as natural science and excluded the human condition actually suited the interests of the landed and the wealthy

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

INET grantee JW Mason has been engaged in an important debate with the Financial Times’ Matthew Klein over the relationship of household debt to income inequality

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