As predictability has gone down, governments and firms need to find ways to be more nimble. They need organizational forms that are flexible and flat. They need policies and business practices that can be adjusted quickly in light of new information. While the watchword is uncertainty, a few things are coming into focus. One is […]
In the postwar era, developed economies have experienced two substantial trends in the net capital share of aggregate income: a rise during the last several decades, which is well known, and a fall of comparable magnitude that continued until the 1970s, which is less well known. Overall, the net capital share has increased since 1948, […]
The academic-dominated approach is not working, especially for economically disadvantaged students. Of this group, about 20 percent of teenagers don’t graduate from high school at all. Of those who do graduate, about half matriculate to some form of college. But many are not ready: two-thirds of low-income students at community colleges start in remedial classes. . . The common outcome of our current strategy—“bachelor’s degree or bust”—is that a young person drops out of college at age 20 with no post-secondary credential, no skills, and no work experience, but a fair amount of debt. That’s a terrible way to begin adult life, and it’s even worse if the young adult aims to escape poverty.
“The high level of income inequality in the United States is at the forefront of policy attention. This paper focuses on one potential policy response: an increase in the top personal income tax rate. We conduct a simulation analysis using the Tax Policy Center (TPC) microsimulation model to determine how much of a reduction in income inequality would be achieved from increasing the top individual tax rate to as much as 50 percent. We calculate the resulting change in income inequality assuming an explicit redistribution of all new revenue to households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The resulting effects on overall income inequality are exceedingly modest.”
Despite the large increases in economic inequality since 1970, American survey respondents exhibit no increase in support for redistribution, in contrast to the predictions from standard theories of redistributive preferences. . . In particular, the two groups who have most moved against income redistribution are the elderly and African-Americans, two groups relatively more reliant on it.
In the postwar era, developed economies have experienced two substantial trends in the net capital share of aggregate income: a rise during the last several decades, which is well-known, and a fall of comparable magnitude that continued until the 1970s, which is less well-known. Overall, the net capital share has increased since 1948, but when disaggregated this increase comes entirely from the housing sector: the contribution to net capital income from all other sectors has been zero or slightly negative, as the fall and rise have offset each other.
Workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields play a direct role in driving economic growth. Yet, because of how the STEM economy has been defined, policymakers have mainly focused on supporting workers with at least a bachelor’s (BA) degree, overlooking a strong potential workforce of those with less education but substantial STEM skills.
Up and down the Atlantic coast, US ports are abuzz. Dredging machines, tunnel excavators, and highway pavers from Miami to New York are preparing metropolitan economies and their ports for a newly expanded Panama Canal. As the thinking goes, an expanded Canal promises bigger ships, bigger cargo loads–and each metro wants a piece of the bigger business.