Warning to All Budget Slashers and Sequesterers: Austerity Economics is Bad...
Amid the wreckage of the 2008-09 Wall Street collapse and Great Recession, orthodox economists and political elites in both the United States and Western Europe have been strongly and consistently...
View ArticleHow Big a Bite Will the Sequester Really Take from the Pentagon?
This Friday, March 1, federal budget sequestration is set to take effect unless Congress intervenes to prevent it. At stake is about $85 billion, split between military and non-military federal...
View ArticleCould the Fed Still Stimulate Job Creation on the Cheap? A Dialogue
Introduction—Bob Pollin: Now that the deadline has passed on Friday for preventing $55 billion in annual cuts to both social and military spending relative to previously allocated levels, it is...
View ArticleSelf-Inflicted Wounds on the Road to Recovery
In a speech last month, Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen identified some causes of the “painfully slow recovery for America’s workers.” Some of the causes she mentioned can’t be easily remedied;...
View ArticleThe Global Unemployment Crisis
After the near collapse of the financial system and the Great Recession, unemployment has significantly increased worldwide. According to the ILO Global Employment Trends 2013 report, a special edition...
View ArticleGone So Soon: The BLS “Green Goods and Services” Program
If you can’t measure it, how can you know if it’s growing? The green economy suffers from this problem. In the past few decades, and particularly in the past few years, the green economy has expanded...
View ArticleA Debate on Back To Full Employment, Round Two:Robert Pollin and Phillip Harvey
Last December, I posted a very thoughtful set of critiques of my book Back to Full Employment by Phillip Harvey, a Professor of Law and Economics at Rutgers University. I posted my responses to Phil...
View ArticleThe Barriers to Full Employment Are Political, Not Economic
In “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” a still widely cited article from 1943, Michal Kalecki raised many questions about the ability of a capitalist economy to maintain prolonged full employment —...
View ArticleHow to Solve the Crisis Without Doing a Thing
Are you concerned with unemployment and the effects of austerity on the very slow recovery? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), with the help of mainstream theory, has a solution. Just hike the...
View ArticleThe Reinhart-Rogoff Reassessment
Updated April 22 In this new paper, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin look carefully at the analysis underlying a cornerstone of government austerity plans: studies by Carmen Reinhart and...
View ArticleHas the Recovery of Households’ Net Worth Done Any Good?
Many economists and market participants applauded the Federal Reserve’s decision in September 2012 to make monthly purchases of $85 billion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, and hold...
View ArticleThe Reinhart/Rogoff Debate Continued, in The New York Times
Last Friday, The New York Times published a lengthy response by Reinhart and Rogoff to our critique of their work in “Growth in a Time of Debt,” and the ensuing worldwide debate. We have replied to...
View ArticleUndercounting the Poor
Nearly two decades ago, a blue-ribbon panel of poverty experts selected by the national Academy of Sciences told us that the official U.S. government poverty measure is “demonstrably flawed … it needs...
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