Doing the Minimum | No Mercy / No Malice
The inability to rise, or even to maintain middle-class status, has sparked calls for a universal basic income, a policy embraced by many in the clerisy and throughout the oligarchy. A universal basic income would stand as what Karl Marx called “the proletarian alms bag,” keeping the masses from destitution without assisting them to move up, start ... See more
Our Neo-Feudal Future | Joel Kotkin
The pay justice movements, the wage ratio movements, and the central banks’ recommended tax plans, plus political movements everywhere supporting job guarantees and progressive taxation,
Kim Stanley Robinson • The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
The institute observes that the average American worker grew 72 percent more productive between 1973 and 2014, but the median worker’s pay rose only about 9 percent in this time. In short, America doesn’t have a problem of lagging productivity so much as a problem of the gains from productivity being captured by elites. The increasingly extractive
... See moreAnand Giridharadas • Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Most economic debates are about income , not wealth. When we talk about income taxes, or welfare benefits, or labor’s share of national income, we’re talking about the amount of goods and services that get created every year, and how those goods and services get allocated among the various people in a society. But in the 2010s, we saw a lot of deba... See more
Noah Smith • There's not that much wealth in the world
For instance, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the wealthy earn eight percent on their holdings, annually and on average, while the poor earn one percent. If one-fifth of the gains to the wealthy trickle down to the poor over time, then the poor are better off if the wealthy command more resources. They will receive one-fifth of the eig
... See moreTyler Cowen • Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
This fact is even more striking when we consider that the cost of eradicating poverty in any developed country is around 1 percent of GDP. An individual unemployment benefit set at the poverty line (around $1,200 a month) and granted to all jobless individuals regardless of their place in the family structure would not only pull everyone out of pov... See more