Most are consumed, properly so, by the election. But what Stiglitz wrote yesterday deserves reading:
One answer occasionally heard from the neoliberal economists who advocated for these policies is that people are better off. They just don’t know it. Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists.
But income data suggest that it is the neoliberals who may benefit from therapy. Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.
The effects of the economic pain and dislocation that many Americans are experiencing are even showing up in health statistics. For example, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, this year ’s Nobel laureate, have shown that life expectancy among segments of white Americans is declining.
The data is daunting. It is temping in an election season to view this as an attack on the President. It isn’t: he inherited a disaster, prevented a recession, and the economy is creating jobs as seen in the most recent job report.
Read the whole article. I find one part particularly interesting. He says:
Importing goods from China – goods that require a lot of unskilled workers to produce – reduces the demand for unskilled workers in Europe and the US...
Not surprisingly, the neoliberals never advertised this consequence of trade liberalization, as they claimed – one could say lied – that all would benefit.
But it is worth remembering just how long running our economic problems are. Not the following chart. Productivity is increasing, and labor compensation isn’t.
In my view the forces at work: automation and globalization are long running. Electing Clinton will help and is important. But the forces at work here are larger than the political discussion about them. There is, and has been, a systemic crisis in the economy. Fixing it long, and complicated.