Our blog is the place where our staff and guest bloggers present clear, fact-based posts that make the connections between economic inequality and growth for the broad policy community and journalists based on the latest academic research.
This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope […]
The public discussion about inflation and unemployment appears to me to be substantially awry. It appears to incorporate two, and only two, lessons from history. The first of these lessons is that pushing the unemployment rate below the level corresponding to full employment leads to strong upward pressure on inflation. The second of these lessons […]
Worthy reads on Equitable Growth: The development of the idea that economics—labor economics especially—needs to focus more on power needs to be highlighted anew. Read our former colleague Ben Zipperer’s conversation with David Card and Alan Krueger: “Equitable Growth in Conversation: An interview with David Card and Alan Krueger.” Here’s Krueger in the interview: “I […]
Tax policy is an important tool for improving economic performance and ensuring that the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared. Taxes support the living standards of the American public by providing the revenues necessary to pay for public investment in children, families, and infrastructure, for social insurance and safety net programs, for national defense, and for many other public programs that support our quality of life. Taxes also affect the choices people make in both positive and negative ways and, as a result, influence the level and distribution of income, consumption, wealth, and broader measures of economic well-being.
“Equitable Growth in Conversation” is a recurring series where we talk with economists and other social scientists to help us better understand whether and how economic inequality affects economic growth and stability. In this installment, Equitable Growth’s Executive Director and Chief Economist Heather Boushey talks with Michael R. Strain, the John G. Searle Scholar and […]
Welcome to the new Equitable Growth website! We designed the new site to help further our mission of advancing evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth. Please explore and tell us what you think. Since our founding in 2013, we have funded the work of more than 130 scholars and […]
Washington, D.C. — The Washington Center for Equitable Growth announced today that former Federal Reserve chair and Council of Economic Advisers chair Janet L. Yellen has joined the organization’s Steering Committee. Yellen, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, served a four-year term as chair of the Board of Governors of the […]
Overview The U.S. economy seems quite healthy these days. Overall economic growth, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product, has been growing at close to a 3 percent inflation-adjusted pace over the past year. Inflation is moving up toward the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Long-term interest rates are increasing as well. These signs of […]
Nick Bunker has a very nice piece from late last month on wage growth and employment, as it bears on the question of whether the United States is at “full employment.” My take is that the U.S. economy probably is because at current unemployment and employment rates, if no additional shocks were to hit the […]
Ten years ago, some of the failings of macroeconomics models were made quite bare as the Great Recession ripped through the global economy. Economists were—and continue to be—criticized because their models seemed to lack any sort of connection to reality. Yet in one critical area, those charges don’t stick these days. Macroeconomists are increasingly not missing out on one of the biggest trends in the U.S. economy: high levels of income and wealth inequality.
