Rethinking the Economy

It feels like I’m getting close to having the right pieces for my framework. Where I’m still really struggling is gluing them together. So, I’ve been playing around with a new way of an intro for my framework that riffs off of Demos/Topos’ Promoting Broad Prosperity. Here’s the longer version:

The middle class is in trouble [...]

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For a long time, many economists and free-market cheerleaders have argued that raising the minimum wage hurts the workers it’s supposed to help. Back in the mid-90s, David Card and Alan Krueger did a brilliant study comparing fast food workers in certain counties in New Jersey versus Pennsylvania to show that increasing the minimum wage [...]

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This is what happens when you don’t read those pesky messaging memos. From Center for American Progress’ Wonk Room:
In his interview with the Wonk Room, [American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist] Felmy recognized that the [Center for American Progress] report concluded that you would get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs [...]

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A few weeks ago, BusinessWeek ran a piece by Intel founder Andy Grove about how to create more jobs in the US. I held off reading it; I wasn’t interested in another diatribe about how we need to cut taxes on big business, create more “labor flexibility” by destroying unions, and general give Corporate [...]

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Via Bob Herbert, a Rockefeller Foundation study using a new index for measuring economic insecurity — the percent of Americans who had a net loss of 25% or more of their financial income — shows that for many Americans, life got less secure, not more over the last few decades:
In 1985, at a time [...]

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I heard an interview with Steve Hill, author of Europe’s Promise, in which he said Germany’s new chancellor Merkel, is in favor of the German policy that pushes companies to reduce the number of hours employees work rather than laying them off. A little Googling and voila, a NYT description of Merkel’s [...]

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The International City/County Management Association just came out with an report, Getting Smart About Climate Change, that’s a nice example of Principle #2, Place Your Bets. It uses case studies to illustrate nine strategies cities and counties are using to combat global warming:
1. Create more sustainable and resilient communities
2. Green the local economy
3. Engage [...]

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This week’s New York Times Magazine also had fascinating article about efforts to come up with an alternative to the GDP — i.e., how to put a number on how our country is doing. For years, economists and activists have criticized the GDP as a bad way to measure how we’re doing. For example, Katrina [...]

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[Part 2 of Values-based vs. Market-based Approaches to the Economy]
Last week, I argued that a values-based framework has two big advantages over a market-based framework in setting the agenda. We’re more likely to debate what really matters to us. And we’re more likely to debate who should get to decide — and in [...]

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What does Business Insider consider “mind blowing“?
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.
The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.
If you’re in [...]

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