Economics for Inclusive Prosperity

When we talk about inclusive prosperity, what's top of mind is usually the 40-plus years of stagnation for the bottom 90% of American wage earners that began in the mid-1970s. It’s been the primary driver today’s record levels of inequality. University of Massachusetts economist Arin Dube has spent a significant portion of his career studying what caused that pay gap, which began with a decoupling...

Today we’re talking about food, specifically agricultural R&D. The world’s population has grown from about 2 billion to 8 billion people in the last century. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But the silver lining was that technology was advancing—particularly during the so-called “Green Revolution” from the 1940s to the 1980s when new high-yield grain varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides dramatic...

It’s a widely held belief in our society, even among groups that disagree with each other on other issues, that meritocracy is a public good. Broadly, meritocracy speaks to our innate sense of fairness—people should get what they deserve. But what exactly constitutes merit? In the dictionary, it’s defined as a “praiseworthy quality” or being deserving of praise. That’s about as subjective as it ge...

Today's college students will soon face a challenging job market that will potentially be made worse by AI. The cost of living is up, housing is painfully expensive, and future home ownership seems more like a cruel fantasy than the American Dream. And they know it’s tough out there. In fact, they’ve lived their entire lives in a world that’s been getting progressively less economically equal. The...

Creating "good jobs" is the holy grail of both politics and economics these days. The problem is that surveys show that most people don’t think they have one. In fact as many as 60 percent of Americans who are currently working say that. So where do we look for good jobs? For three successive presidencies, the answer has been the manufacturing sector, but Harvard economist Dani Rodrick says the ev...

Economists have learned a lot studying the Great Depression and the Great Recession. But it’s the Great Compression era that some believe holds the most relevant and necessary lessons for today. Lasting roughly from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, it was a period marked by a dramatic narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor. In between create a strong and historically equitab...

University of Chicago economist and Professor Luigi Zingales has been studying capitalism for nearly 40 years, ever since he moved to the United State from Milan, where he had become disillusioned with the crony capitalism and economic unfairness in his native Italy. But he pretty quickly discovered that the U.S. version of capitalism was no bargain either. He’s been trying to fix it ever since, t...

University of Oxford economist Max Kasy is pushing back hard on the popular notion that artificial intelligence is an unstoppable technological tidal wave and we're all on the beach waiting powerlessly for it to crash over us. That view of AI is wrong — or at least, conveniently incomplete, says Kasy, who runs the Machine Learning and Economics Group at Oxford and who’s just written a new book cal...

Optimists see the glass as half full. Pessimists see it as half empty. Zero-sum thinkers believe that if someone else’s glass is full, that water was more than likely taken from their glass. Zero-sum thinking is a primary field of study for our guest on this episode of the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity podcast: Economist Stefanie Stantcheva . She’s the Nathanial Ropes Professor of Political E...

Princeton University economist Atif Mian says record wealth inequality has become a major macroeconomic problem. Born and raised in Pakistan, Mian came to the United States to study math and engineering at MIT, where he discovered economics and eventually earned his PhD. After the 2008 financial crisis, he rose to prominence with his groundbreaking research on the relationship between debt, the fi...

Neoliberalism and economic nationalism are the two dominant meta-models for the global economy today. Proponents call them pathways to prosperity, but both have been blamed for exacerbating ongoing climate degradation, record levels of inequality, and political instability.  Is there a way to build a more inclusive, more sustainable, and more prosperous economy for everyone? Economists Dani Rodrik...