Ten forces have defined how we have lived our lives during the last one hundred years, but the “rights” revolution is at their core and will shape how we live the next hundred years.
Daron Acemoglu, the MIT labour economist and co-author of Why Nations Fail, begins a recently released paper on a very personal note: “I write this as I await the birth of my second son.”
Continue reading “The ten trends that have shaped the last century, and that will shape the next”
Canada’s youth are still waiting.
The 2012 federal budget not only missed the opportunity to create a youth employment strategy, it actually eliminated Katimavik, a program that could have been reoriented, redefined and expanded to meet our labour market needs.
Continue reading “A youth employment strategy would look like this”
This is the question Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution asks in a tightly written discussion of the factors relating inequality with opportunity.
Sawhill’s answer: “at current levels of inequality in the U.S. it likely does. However, this answer is qualified in several ways.”
Continue reading ““Are We Headed toward a Permanently Divided Society?””
On a warm evening last spring I found myself at a dinner party in the lush suburbs of a small Ivy League town not far from New York City.
The main concern of a fellow economist was the trouble his son was having raising his new family: that would be the son living in Manhattan, the one making $10 million a year.
It appears there is a bidding war for spaces in good kindergartens and, as we all know, prices skyrocket when demand outstrips supply.
And demand has been rising. We also know that.
So the most striking claim in the Economic Report of the President for 2012 is not that the share of earnings accruing to the top 1%—a share that was about 8% during the early 1980s—stands at close to 20%. After all, this is old news, the stuff of Occupy Wall Street.
Continue reading “Inequality begets inequality, according to the Economic Report of the President”
The major point in Charles Murray‘s book—Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010—is that the United States “is coming apart at the seams—not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”
You can watch him summarize the major messages of his book in this February 14th interview hosted by the TVO program The Agenda.
The book has proved to be instantly provocative. Toward the end of this interview, at about 13 minutes and 50 seconds, Murray states: “I don’t do solutions very well.”
So why all the buzz?
The New York Times posed this question to a group of experts, Richard Florida, Isabel Sawhill, Timothy Smeeding, and five others, including me.
More specifically, they asked:
There is a growing consensus that it is harder to move up the economic ladder in the United States than in many other places, like Canada. Should more Americans consider leaving the U.S. to get ahead? Or can the U.S. make changes to be more of a “land of opportunity”?
Continue reading “Is the U.S. Still a ‘Land of Opportunity’?”
Economics for public policy 