North America

The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum explains the role Democratic presidents, from Kennedy to Obama, in moving economic policy to the right

Andrea Gabor, author of “After the Education Wars,” discusses how California is pushing back on millionaire-driven charter schools. Will the rest of the America follow?

The Chicago School has long used bankrupt assumptions to strangle antitrust policy

Economist Marie Mora discusses the deep economic crisis that has afflicted Puerto Rico for years

There is not one opioid crisis in America—there are many. And supply-focused measures won’t stop them.

With journalism moving from a stable to a precarious profession, digital media workers have become some of the most organized in the startup world

Ben Power, who adapted the play “The Lehman Trilogy,” talks about the eponymous family’s role in the creation and destruction of American wealth

A collection of our research on populism, globalization and nationalism

The Chicago School’s weakening of antitrust law hurt the economy

Decades before it caught on with other economists, Sadie Alexander was the first economist to recommend a government jobs guarantee in the US

Pharmaceutical pushers like Purdue “couldn’t have done their dirty work” without America’s increasingly unbalanced economy

Until 2008, rising home values gave the middle class a cushion amid growing income inequality. But following the financial crisis, that wealth has failed to return.

The Koch brothers scandal at George Mason University

Sen. Tammy Baldwin features arguments in questions to SEC nominees, pharmaceutical industry witness

This paper discusses household debt as a long term phenomenon that influences economies beyond crises.1 In other words, rather than look at how household indebtedness can lead to crises, I will focus on its surprising persistence at very high levels, and its interactions along the way with other key variables, such as public policies and spending. The first section describes some stylized facts and the final section explores the macroeconomic consequences.

Donald Trump’s presidency is a symptom of an interregnum between economic orders – a period that will result in a new balance between state and market. While his administration’s economic policies are unlikely to provide the right answer, they may at least show the world what not to do.

Professor Temin sees the US economy as bifurcated along lines analogous to the situation described in developing world economies by W. Arthur Lewis.

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Economist Darrick Hamilton and Institute President Rob Johnson discuss “stratification economics”, which addresses the failure of orthodox economics to see, explain and point to remedies for persistent racial inequality.

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

Institute for New Economic Thinking President Robert Johnson, in an appearance of the CNN International show Quest Means Business, warns that the anger of Trump’s supporters is unlikely to ebb absent significant economic and political changes — and that this anger could be more successfully marshaled by a more skilled and sophisticated Republican challenger four years from now. 

Oversights of two generations of social scientists have weakened democracy.

Globalisation was once considered a doctrine of salvation - but it has produced too many losers and created a breeding ground for heralds of simplistic truths. It is high time for a new doctrine.

It’s time to connect political violence with economic violence.

The 2008 financial crisis was a shock to faith in entirely free financial markets. But the neoliberal assumptions underlying the previously dominant “Washington Consensus” continue to inform much Western commentary on China’s economy.

A discussion featuring Kenneth Smith, Head of the Trade and NAFTA Office of the Ministry of the Economy of Mexico, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of Pelosky Global Strategies.

In this comment, we explain our objections to the SEC’s current formulation of the Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule on each of three grounds: the erroneous estimation of CEO pay; the unclear specification of the “median” worker; and the risk of normalizing a pay ratio that is far too high. Then we present the latest data on the remuneration of the 500 highest-paid CEOs in the United States, demonstrating the way in which the SEC’s measure of CEO pay that enters into the CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio tends to systematically underestimate actual executive pay.

The “War on Poverty,” and the impact of public policy

A trade war would undoubtedly hurt both sides. But there is reason to believe that the US has more to lose. If nothing else, the Chinese seem to know precisely which weapons they have available to them. China could stop purchasing US aircraft, impose an embargo.

Mallaby’s research shows that Greenspan knew more about the looming perils than people realize.

Stanford economic historian Professor Gavin Wright, addressing the Institute’s conference on the economics of race, argues that the conditions facing the children of the great migration from the South are very different to the conditions for the children of those who stayed behind. 

Professor Tchen explores the many layers of “otherness” at work in America’s political economy

Slight increases in national-average earnings for older workers mask long-run stagnation and decline in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states that unexpectedly voted for Donal Trump

Columbia professor Dan O’Flaherty explains how an awareness of racial trauma developed from growing up in Newark inspired him to write and teach on the economics of race.

Hoping to learn from other countries’ experiences in organizing finance for agriculture, more than 150 Americans were sent abroad in the summer of 1913 to investigate the minutiae of farm-credit systems in and around Europe.

In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs.

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Historian Prof. Thomas Sugrue offers a critique of the conventional wisdom that roots the city’s fate in the racial tension of the tumultuous ‘60s and the decline of the auto industry.

The 2008 financial meltdown wiped out what was left of the savings of millions of American families, but Professor Edward Wolff says decades of income inequality had set the stage for the collapse of their household wealth.

The US stands out as an outlier: the US spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less.

Technology will ruin America if we don’t compensate for its impact, warns Andy Stern.

How Gerald Friedman’s assessment of Bernie Sanders economic proposals prompted a rare public political spat among economists.

The Romer/Romer letter to Professor Gerald Friedman marks a turning point. It concedes that there are indeed important issues at stake when evaluating the proposed economic policies of Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders. These issues go beyond the political debate and should be discussed seriously between and among professional economists.

Gerald Friedman responds to the Romers on the Sanders Plan.

Bullet-point financial reform proposals are either too simple or too vague.

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.

The purpose of this Chartbook is to present a summary of evidence about changes in economic inequality – primarily income, earnings, and wealth – for 25 countries covering a 100 year period from 1911 to 2010.

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Archival artifacts from the history of economics.

Since 2011, the Institute has partnered with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) to change the way the field approaches the interplay between economics and governance, accelerating the development of new economic thinking.

This research project focuses mainly on whether the wealth of the United States middle class recovered and whether wealth inequality continued to rise or moderated over the years 2010 to 2013 following the financial crisis of 2008.

This research project investigates the rise of federal credit programs in the United States, leading to a better understanding of the development of federal credit programs.

This research project examines how the spatial pattern of inequality in US cities shapes the provision of public transit and more broadly the prospects for a more equitable and sustainable transportation policy.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

This research project seeks to understand the linkages between the changes in the financial economy and the behavior of households in the real economy.

This research project follows freed slaves from when they first applied for their land under the Southern Homestead Act until 1900 to learn how access to free land influenced their economic progress.

This research project constructs new measures of slavery as a state-sanctioned property rights institution and documents how slavery impacted economic development in US history.

A jointly-created research institute devoted to finding a more realistic way of thinking about the economy, using tools from decision theory and the theory of networks to tackle problems such as unemployment and inequality.

This research project investigates the influence of economic doctrines on policy norms in recent decades through analysis of the history of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

This research project explores and documents the development of graduate economics training in the leading centers of doctoral education in the United States.

This research project offers a radical reconsideration of the centrality of the Corn Returns to the development of classical liberal political economy and shows how much the Corn Laws enriched agrarian interests and how their repeal represented a boost to British manufacturing.

This research project examines how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that into mathematics.

This research project analyzes the history of the concentration of bank regulatory authority within the Federal Reserve and explores the public policy issues arising from that concentration.

This research project documents long-run trends in personal bankruptcy, with special emphasis on the use of the bankruptcy law at the local level and among women.

April 28-29, 2017, USC Dornsife INET is hosting a conference on inequality, globalization, and macroeconomics at the University of Southern California. The goal of this conference is to bring together leading researchers to discuss and present new approaches and new results on the relationships between inequality and macroeconomics and between inequality and globalization. Please direct any questions or comments to inet@usc.edu. 

This paper presents an historical analysis of the antitrust laws.

Prisoners employed in manufacturing constitute 4.2% of total U.S. manufacturing employment in 2005; they produce cheap goods, creating labor demand shock.

On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws related to employment. The expectation was that African Americans would be prime beneficiaries of the EEOC.

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history.

Economics has a race problem.

The YSI Economic History Working Group invites scholars to submit their research on alternative perspectives and different approaches to the study of economic history. The workshop will take place on 29 July, 2018, in Boston, Massachusetts, preceding the World Economic History Congress (29 July  - 3 August).

On February 22-24, 2019, the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) will host its North America Convening in Los Angeles.

The Chicago School has long used bankrupt assumptions to strangle antitrust policy.