Inequalities

Tag: skills biased transformation

  • Is Income Inequality Exaggerated?

    The premise of Occupy Wall Street is simple: American society is becoming more unequal as a privileged minority takes control of an increasingly larger share of wealth and power. As I mentioned in my post last week, not all scholars agree with this assessment. Robert J. Gordon at Northwestern University in a 2009 NBER paper…

  • The middle-class in poor countries

    Last week I blogged the first part of an interview with Phillip Brown, and his work with Lauder and Ashton on the ‘global auction’ for middle-class jobs. In this final post, I asked him whether offshoring middle-class jobs is actually a bad thing, and consider the future path of inequality in low-income countries.

  • Offshoring middle-class jobs: myths, realities, policies

    Good jobs in the UK and US are under threat, facing a ‘global auction’ against emerging economies that Western countries are likely to lose – according to a fascinating recent book by Brown, Lauder & Ashton that I previously described in two separate posts. Philip Brown kindly agreed to do an interview for the Inequalities…

  • Who benefits from ‘economic growth?’

    For a while now, it’s been recognised that wages for median workers in the US haven’t risen in a generation – but it was sometimes assumed that this was a phenomenon limited to the US. However, a new report released today by the Resolution Foundation – my tip for the most influential UK think-tank over…

  • Apprenticeships in a Volatile Labor Market

     When people talk about what it takes to succeed in the labor market today, they may talk about having the right connections or a college degree, but they rarely talk about apprenticeships. Most people in the United States (including many analysts and policymakers) assume that people that want to further their training will enter college…

  • The impending fall of the Western middle-class (Part II)

    In my post last week I described the controversial new book The Global Auction, where Brown, Lauder and Ashton argue that the Western middle-class are subject to increasing competition from an army of highly-qualified workers in India, China and other countries. Not only can the workers undercut the pay of the Western middle-classes, but companies…

  • The impending fall of the Western middle-class (part I)

    Middle-class people in rich Western countries like to tell a story about globalization, which goes something like this. Globalization means that some menial jobs are off-shored or outsourced, but new jobs are created in their wake – setting us on the path to a fulfilling and high-income ‘knowledge economy’. There are some transitional costs as…

  • Inequality After the Crisis

    Should social scientists stop carping about celebrities and CEOs and start worrying more about the next financial crisis? Tyler Cowen has an interesting article from a left libertarian slant in which he argues that “most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even…

  • The Interaction of Employment, Geography, and Education

    What do New York City, Des Moines, and San Francisco have in common? All three were relatively good places for people with less than a high school diploma to find employment during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three are among the 20 metropolitan areas with the highest share of college employment…

  • Get American Politics Out of America: Some Further Thoughts on Hacker and Pierson

    In her second post on Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, Charlotte Cavaille offers some thoughts about how to bring comparative politics back into the study of American economic inequality. In my previous post, I summarized and lauded Hacker and Pierson’s recent book on the political origins of the dramatic increase in income inequalities…