Articles

HCEO’s new three-question series will regularly publish quick Q&As with members who will discuss their work, frontiers in the field of inequality that could use more knowledge, and advice for emerging scholars.

Today’s richest Americans may soon blow past the tycoons of the Roaring Twenties. Lance Taylor explains why, and what to do about it.

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Can education stop the country’s backward slide?

There is a deeper story to be told about the inclusion of the Renminbi.

Sometimes a radical path is the most practical way out of a mess.

Throughout its first 10 years operation, the John Bates Clark medal was constantly challenged. Many young economists found it biased toward theory, and demanded the establishment of a distinct award for applied work.

The World Bank’s global poverty estimates suffer from deep-seated problems arising from a single source, the lack of a standard for identifying who is poor and who is not that is consistent and meaningful.

Economists’ assumptions, even about seemingly “small” matters, make an enormous difference to global poverty estimates but their impact often goes unnoticed, and the choices made have been badly justified. We must stop pretending that the World Bank’s “$1 per day” estimates are at all reliable.

A little-understood rule in the tax code is making headlines. What’s all the fuss?