Inequality & Distribution

The corporate titans of yore once offered a sizable wage premium over smaller employers—but not anymore. What happened?

A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movement’s success.

How did globalization create such discontent in developed and developing countries alike? Nobel laureate and INET grantee Joseph Stiglitz explains in this 150th episode of our “New Economic Thinking” video series.

Untangling the Facts about Immigration in the World Economy.

Inequality isn’t driven by taxes—it’s driven by the power of capital in relation to workers

The prevailing wisdom that aggregate demand ‘shocks’ determine short-run cyclical fluctuations around a supply-determined equilibrium growth rate and an associated equilibrium unemployment rate (or NAIRU) has been called into question by various streams of literature in the last decades. Specifically, a recently revived literature on hysteresis finds significant persistence in the effects of recessions and negative aggregate demand shocks (Blanchard et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).

We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output.

As dual economies transform countries, how does world politics adjust?

A discussion with Steven M. Fazzari, INET Grantee and the Bert A. & Jeanette L. Lynch Distinguished Professor of Economics, Washington University.

What can policy do to remedy the spread of dual economies in the developed world?

Building symbiotic public-private partnerships

Can a Policy of Guaranteed Basic Income Return Mature Market Economies to les Trente Glorieuses?

Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.