Before you finish packing for your vacation to the cottage, the beach, the backyard or the balcony, I thought you would appreciate some suggestions for your summer reading. (If you live in Australia, New Zealand, India, or anywhere else south of the equator, I hope you will read for the sheer pleasure, at work if you must!)
The first book on your holiday reading list is, without doubt, …
Continue reading “Your summer reading list on inequality and opportunity”
[ This post is a book review of: Gregory Clark (with Neil Cummins, Yu Hao, and Daniel Diaz Vidal and others), 2014. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ]
The Son Also Rises forcefully advances the idea that social position is determined by innate inherited abilities, an idea that is potentially pregnant with policy implications. “Once you have selected your mate,” Gregory Clark counsels, “your work is largely done. You can safely neglect your offspring, confident that the innate talents you secured for them will shine through regardless.”
With this book Professor Clark (an economic historian with the University of California at Davis) dons the mantle of Francis Galton, who more than 100 years ago examined the transmission of status across the generations of 19th century England, and who is equally known for the statistical methods he developed to study the issue.
[ The Brookings Institution has been having an online discussion of Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, a book by Joseph Fishkin. This post is a re-blog of my contribution, “Money: a Bottleneck with Bite.” ]
[ This post is a summary of a presentation called “Public insurance to promote social mobility” that I made to the “Social Mobility Summit” held at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC on January 13th, 2014. It is intended for an American readership, and is also posted in an abridged form on the Brookings website. ]
Continue reading “Families need insurance for wages and for family responsibilities”
When President Obama approaches the podium to deliver his State of the Union address he will have two past presidents looking over his shoulders.
Lyndon B. Johnson who in 1964 declared a “War on Poverty”, and Ronald Reagan who in 1986 surrendered victory with the claim that “… poverty won the war. Poverty won in part because instead of helping the poor, government programs ruptured the bonds holding poor families together.”
President Obama will surely celebrate Johnson for initiating the War on Poverty fifty years ago this month, but to advance his agenda he will also stress that government programs are a force for the good.
Continue reading “The two (irreconcilable?) states of the Union”
The suggestion that the middle class is stagnating, the linchpin of Justin Trudeau’s economic platform—to the extent it exists—is an idea shamelessly borrowed from the United States.
Shameless it may be, but it is, nonetheless, true.
Clearly there are some ways in which we are all better off not withstanding what President Obama tells the American public, and notwithstanding how closely Canadian political leaders listen to him.
In 1980, a cell phone was something carried in a brief case; and a Sony Walkman—you surely recall the portable cassette player the size of a thick paperback that strapped “conveniently” to your belt?—was the cutting edge musical accessory.
But shops filled with more variety, and more quality, make us and our kids better off only to a degree, and not only because the power to blow your ear drums out has increased exponentially.
In 1980 middle-income Canadian families reported a total of $57,000 on their tax returns, and 30 years later, … well exactly $57,000.
Continue reading “An American idea about the Canadian middle class”
Economics for public policy 