Tag: inequality

3 Questions: Shaping the future of work in an age of AI

The MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, celebrated its official launch on Jan. 22. The new initiative’s mission is to analyze the forces that are eroding job quality and labor market opportunities for non-college workers and identify innovative ways to move the economy […]

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America’s Rent Crisis Is Getting Worse

Rather than rely on market forces to create affordable housing (Build, baby, build!), I think government will have to intervene more directly. In his 2023 book Poverty, by America, the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond observes, cuttingly, that “liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair.” […]

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The Dubious, Racially Charged Flood Project Biden Is Resurrecting in Mississippi

One Army Corps analysis found that 80 percent of the pumps’ financial benefits would flow to farmers (the prevention of damage to roads and other infrastructure makes up most of the remaining 20 percent). But after decades of discriminatory lending, racist government policies, outright theft, and industry trends hostile to small farms, many Black Delta […]

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The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time

Like all modern social scientists, Alfani and Milanovic have access to datasets and computing power that would astonish classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They make use of these advantages to achieve a clearer understanding of the past, tracing inequality through the histories of Western Europe and the United States. Alfani begins his […]

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How Corporate America’s Obsession With Creativity Wrecked the World and Brought Us Elon Musk

“and everyone is at least potentially creative, how come inequality is compounding along the same old lines of race and class? And considering how many of our modern problems come from having too much new stuff too quickly, what reason do we have to believe that … encouraging more of it will solve any of […]

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Billionaire Philanthropy Is a Scam

Fortunately, in some quarters, wage theft is being treated with the seriousness it deserves. Just this week, ProPublica produced a blockbuster report on wage theft in New York City, finding that from 2017 to 2021, “more than $203 million in wages had been stolen from about 127,000 workers in New York.” And Documented, which partnered […]

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Rich People Are the Big Barrier to Stabilizing the Climate

Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, is campaigning for a small international tax on oil and gas export revenue. William Ruto, the president of Kenya, is calling for a more ambitious package of reforms, including a tax on the international oil trade. (Unlike Brown, he is speaking for a group of countries, as per […]

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The Emerging Coalition That Could Revitalize Our Politics

In Pennsylvania, Democrats have passed bills in the state House to raise the minimum wage and enshrine the right to collective bargaining in the state constitution. They were able to do so in part because DSA and the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO joined forces to elect legislators like Elizabeth Fiedler; unions, teachers, and pro-choice groups also came […]

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Down With Tipping!

There is no denying that raising wages will hurt businesses with already narrow profit margins. Many owners claim that they cannot operate while paying a fair wage. They’re telling the truth—pre–Civil War plantation owners had the exact same complaint about the agricultural economy they built. The solution is not to continue allowing a subminimum wage […]

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To Save Your Favorite Restaurant, Destroy Tipping Culture

There is no denying that raising wages will hurt businesses with already narrow profit margins. Many owners claim that they cannot operate while paying a fair wage. They’re telling the truth—pre–Civil War plantation owners had the exact same complaint about the agricultural economy they built. The solution is not to continue allowing a subminimum wage […]

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Are A.P. Classes a Waste of Time?

Abrams makes clear that Conant, Blackmer, and Chalmers, in their various ways, saw the systematizing of college-level education for elite high schoolers, and the standardizing of learning assessment across schools, as a path toward the expansive and thoroughgoing study of literature, history, mathematics, and other subjects that would enrich civic and intellectual life in America. […]

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