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Société Générale expects the unemployment rate in Spain, which currently stands at a record-breaking 27.2 percent, to reach 30 per cent in 2015.

Special mention

Timothy Noah has one story about inequality. Mine, I think, is a bit different.

According to Noah’s story, while conservatives mostly deny the existence of inequality, liberals tend to focus on the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else and forget about the skills-based gap between those with a college education and those without.

I wonder what people he’s talking about. At least in the discipline of economics, while he’s mostly correct about conservatives (who spend a good bit of their time, when they address the issue of inequality at all, denying it’s a problem), liberal economists are the ones who have focused on the different rewards to different levels of education (which can then be solved by improving schools and encouraging higher levels of education). What conservative and liberal economists share is the idea that, in a market system, everyone gets what they deserve (at least when markets clear and there’s full employment).

As I see it, the idea that we needed to worry about the widening gap between the 99 percent and those at the very top actually came from outside the terms of that conservative-liberal debate—in the empirical work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez and in the critique of current economic arrangements posed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. It has represented a challenge to both conservatives (based on the idea that inequality is a real problem) and liberals (since the 1 percent-99 percent gap simply can’t be accounted for by skill-based technical change).

Moreover, focusing on the top 1 percent (and, within that, the top .1 percent and top .01 percent) of the nation’s income distribution raises, in turn, the issue of class, which neither conservative nor liberal economists ever want to discuss.

Nor, as it turns out, does Noah. Until the end, when he finally mentions the divergence between the share of income going to capital (which has been rising) and that going to labor (which has been falling). But focusing on factor shares actually takes us away from skill-based inequality, even when connected to the demise of the union movement, and toward something more fundamental: the growing gap between the vast majority who produce the nation’s wealth and the tiny minority at the top who are able to appropriate a larger and larger share of that wealth.

And solving that problem means going beyond the terms of the conservative-liberal discussion of the problem of inequality and putting class itself on the table.

I guess, in the end, that’s where my story about the problem of inequality differs from the one Noah wants to tell.

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Special mention

Thousands of people are protesting in Rome today against austerity policies and high unemployment.

Today, in reading about the Koch brothers’ mounting pile of petroleum coke in Detroit, I was reminded of the infamous 1991 memo by Larry Summers concerning exporting dirty industries to the Third World.

The neoclassical logic is impeccable:

The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

And that, it seems, is what Detroit has become:

“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,” said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. “Nobody knew this was going to happen.” Almost 56 percent of Canada’s oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, more than 2,000 miles north.

Special mention

There’s no surer sign that someone has achieved pop star status than that they are the target of a satire. And so it is with Paul Krugman.

But, according to Joshua Clover, pop has its particular tensions and contradictions:

In December, Krugman wrote two blog entries in swift succession: “Rise of the Robots” and “Human Versus Physical Capital.” Inequality, his charts informed him, was itself a consequence of the opposition between capital and labor—specifically the increasing domination of capital in the form of machines—as labor is expelled from the production process. That ratio turns out to be basically the same measure as productivity, sine qua non of economic progress.

Moreover, in a development Krugman couldn’t quite bring himself to declare, his charts suggest that a generally declining labor share since the 1970s has also spelled bad news for overall profitability outside the finance sector. The productivity race wasn’t just unfortunate for the unemployed; it was for capital a poison pill of its own making. Thus Krugman’s comedy: always on the verge of discovering the arguments of a 150-year-old book; always turning away at the last second. In Krugman’s words, “I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism—which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.”

Does it? I suppose so. And that uncomfort is what pop, for all its pleasures, must defer. Pop must affirm the way things are, no matter how often it choruses the word “change.” You cannot be Paul Krugman, Pop Star, and at the same time discover that capital is built to break us, and itself—even if your charts so testify. So you will not be shocked to discover Krugman stepped back from this realization and continued about his business, scarcely speaking of it again. There are some things you do not say. They are not popular.