Equitable Growth Conference in a Box: Topics
More often than I would have thought likely, people ask me: “We’re thinking of having a conference about economic inequality What should be on the agenda?”
My standard answer makes three points:
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Have the conference about not inequality but equitable growth. “Inequality” automatically forces you into a partisan political frame, and you may want to get there at the end of your conference but you probably do not want to start there.
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Focus down: you cannot cover the whole topic–you need to pick one or two or three subtopics if you are going to get anywhere.
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Have a balance between people who summarize past literatures and people who break new ground.
But often they ask for more: a list of what the topics and issues are.
So here it is: my Equitable Growth Conference in a Box: Topics
Equitable Growth Conference in a Box
The Race Between Education and Technology
How good a strategy is more higher education for overall economic growth, for raising middle-class standards?
- College funding and college attendance
- College funding and college quality
- College completion
- New modes and orders in college education
- How much of a difference does our losing the race between education and technology make, and where in the distribution does it make it?
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The Dilemmas of K-12 Education
Is there low-hanging fruit in institutional or funding reform for K-12 education?
- Getting the K-12 schools that we need: exit, voice, and loyalty in the school district
- Getting the K-12 teachers that we need after the decline of sex discrimination in employment
- Getting the K-12 students that we need
- Getting the parents of the K-12 students that we need
Social Equality, Diversity, and Economic Distribution
we need to integrate our understanding of the decline in discrimination with our understanding of economic inequality
- Was America in the 1950s a more equal place than today, really?
- Feminism, read families and blue families, and their discontents.
- Family planning, reproductive rights, and inequality.
- Disparate impact: The rising salience of class and the declining salience of race.
- Mass incarceration, militarized policing, race, and inequality.
The Business Cycle and the Income and Wealth Distribution
Moving beyond the false assumption that business cycles are simply fluctuations around stable and unaffected trends
- Hysteresis.
- The business cycle in the labor share: how much of a point did Kalecki have?
- The political economy of austerity.
Taxes and Transfers and the Level and Distribution of Well-Being
What have been the effects of the lowered marginal tax rates starting in 1980?
- What, really, has happened to the progressivity of the tax-and-transfer system since 1980?
- what, really, have been the supply-side effects of reduced marginal tax rates on economic activity?
- How have declining marginal tax rates and other shifts altered the balance of bargaining power among stakeholders of corporations?
- what should the tax-and-transfer system look like?
Institutions, Globalization, and the Bargaining Power of America’s the Working Class
- How much of the decline in unions has been a reaction to rather than a cause of declining working-class bargaining power?
- How much of the decline in working-class bargaining power has been due to globalization, really?
- What is the proper role of labor unions in the twenty-first century?
- Why have attempts to envision alternative economic arrangements to the for-profit corporation controlled by shareholders not had greater success?
Rents and Quasi-Rents in the American Economy, and Their Division
Will wealth be invested in productive capital or in rent-seeking capital…
- NIMBYism
- “Oil and gas” and other rent-seeking sectors and lobbies.
- The financial octopus.
- Intellectual property, the information economy, and rent seeking.
What Special Factors Are at Work in Finance, Takeovers, Private Equity, and CEOs?
How did CEOs become the owners of 20% of the equity value of the corporations they run anyway?
- The old-school corporate structure of the 1970s and its incomes.
- Takeovers, private equity, and the overclass.
- Financial deegulation and financial sector compensation.
What Special Factors Are at Work in the Information Economy?
Technological change used to produce not just technoplutocrat but middle-class prosperity, didn’t it?
- Why did the technological advances that produced Kodak generate middle-class prosperity for Rochester while the technological advances that produced Hollywood generate stars and superstars?
- What is the balance between consumer surplus and factor cost in the information economy, and how should that affect our perceptions of economic growth?
- What is the proper role of the government in the information economy?
- Accept for the moment that the rise of the robots will put downward pressure on both prices of consumer goods and services and wages. How would we know whether this is a process that should worry us?
The Political Economy of Gilded Ages: Does Piketty Have It Right? And If Not Him, Who Does Have It Right?
What is the “natural” distribution of wealth and inheritance in industrial societies? Gilded Age or Social Democratic Era?
- Land rents and inequality in historical perspective.
- Rates of profit and rates of accumulation.
- How strong is the tendency for wealth to concentrate?
- Piketty-World or its inverse? Rule of a plutocratic overclass or “euthanasia of the rentier“?