The Washington Center for Equitable Growth Needs a New Chair, Paul…
I am going to have to unplug from the internet or I am never going to get through cracking Reifschneider, Wascher, and Wilcox…
Now I am once again distracted by Paul Krugman…
Paul Krugman: Inequality As A Defining Challenge:
Inequality is finally surfacing as a significant unifying issue… and there… [are] a couple of backlashes. One comes from groups like Third Way; Josh Marshall… characterized that kind of position best….
A fossilized throwback to a period in the late 20th century when there was a market for groups trying to pull the Democrats ‘back to the center and away from the ideological extreme’ in an era when Democrats are the fairly non-ideological party and have a pretty decent record of winning elections in which most people vote.
But there’s also an intellectual backlash…
Ezra Klein arguing… inequality, while an issue, doesn’t rate being described as “the defining challenge of our time”…. I would argue that Ezra has gotten this one wrong…. The key point, however, is that the case for regarding inequality as a major, indeed defining challenge… rests on multiple pillars…. Four points….
- In sheer quantitative terms, rising inequality is what Joe Biden would call a Big Something Deal… rising inequality has done more than the slump to depress middle-class incomes….
- There is a reasonable case for assigning at least partial blame for the economic crisis to rising inequality…. Is this a slam-dunk case? No–but it’s serious….
- There’s the political economy aspect, where you can argue that policy failures both before and, perhaps even more crucially, after the crisis were distorted by rising inequality, and the corresponding increase in the political power of the 1 percent….
- The question of what progressive think tanks should research. Klein suggests that “how to fight unemployment” should be a more central topic than “how to reduce inequality.” But here’s the thing: we know how to fight unemployment…. There’s no mystery about the economics of our slow recovery…. The question is why our political system ignored everything macroeconomics has learned, and the answer to that question, as I’ve suggested, has a lot to do with inequality.
The causes of soaring inequality, on the other hand, are more mysterious…. So inequality is definitely a defining challenge; whether it is “the” defining challenge can be argued, but it makes very good sense for progressives to focus much of their energy on the issue…