Inequality & Distribution

The governance of technology is a new challenge. The Recovery Plans is encouraging the digital transformation of our economies. An acceleration of technological change is bound to deeply affect labor markets and income distribution. While labor-market adaptation is likely to stave off permanent high unemployment, it cannot be counted on to prevent a sharp rise in inequality.

The world won’t emerge from the pandemic until the pandemic is controlled everywhere, and this is a special concern because of the new mutations that are likely to arise where the disease is running its course. So too, the world won’t have a robust economic recovery until at least most of the world is on the course to prosperity. Global growth is far more muted now than then, and inward-looking policies in some of the nations where growth has been restored have resulted in an increase in their trade surplus, attenuating the global impact of their recovery.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.

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The plight of white blue-collar workers is well-known, but Blacks in that category were feeling the squeeze long before their white counterparts.

How once-promising Black upward mobility reversed course, and what can be done about it

The economy is likely to be crippled for months and fiscal rescue on a large scale, once again, is very much necessary.

Traditional welfare systems have emphasized the need for redistribution post-production. Are these policies sufficient in the future?

Warnings of “corruption and incompetence coming together,” as economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum study the race to end the pandemic.

What are the 100 most pertinent economic questions facing our global societ?

Human societies have always coevolved with technology, but how can we think of technology? Is it an external force outside our control, or do we have a say in its direction, development and deployment?

Racial inequalities of wealth and income are pervasive. This episode of Debt Talks will feature a conversation with four prominent experts on the persistence of racial inequalities of wealth and income and the role of financial markets in shaping them.

Mainstream economics ignores historical and structural factors by design

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

Do the benefits of new technologies accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?