Good Economics for Hard Times

The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues.

That does not mean the workers in the United States must necessarily end up worse off. This is because, as Samuelson showed in a later paper, the fact that free trade raises GNP means there is more to go around for everybody, and therefore even workers in the United States can be made better off if society taxes the winners from free trade and dist

Since most of us like to think we are decent people, forcing someone to affirm their own values before exercising a judgment involving others might reduce prejudice. Psychologists these days encourage parents to tell their children not that they should be nice, but that they are nice, and all they have to do is to behave in conformity with their na

As we lose the ability to listen to each other, democracy becomes less meaningful and closer to a census of the various tribes, who each vote based more on tribal loyalties than on a judicious balancing of priorities.

A second reason why low-skilled migration might push up the demand for labor is that it slows down the process of mechanization. The promise of a reliable supply of low-wage workers makes it less attractive to adopt labor-saving technologies.

Just giving a different name to a randomly chosen group of participants got in-group members to favor their own over the others.

In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went

Democracy can live with dissent, as long as there is respect on both sides. But respect demands some understanding.

the income gap between white and black men with similar education has been growing and is now as much as 30 percent, more than that between the scheduled castes and the other castes in India.