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“Inequality wasn’t the answer”

A friend suggested, in an email, that I may have been “on to something” when I presented my “Mind the Gap” paper at the Volcano symposium. The evidence is a recent column by Heather Stewart, who reports on last week’s OECD forum in Paris. For a long time, the growing gap between rich and poor [...]

Where has all the surplus gone?

Where has all the surplus gone? As in 2010, a good chunk of it has gone to pay Chief Executive Officers of major U.S. companies. According to a new Associated Press study, the head of a typical public company in United States made $9.6 million in 2011. This figure was up more than 6 percent [...]

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Bada Bain!

Cartoon of the day

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Middle-class exploitation?

We need to stop obsessing about the middle-class and call things by their right name. Last September, I argued against focusing on a middle-class that needed to be “rebuilt,” suggesting that we return instead to the discourse of the working-class. Recent research by Jeff Kidder and Isaac Martin just confirms my view.* Their argument is [...]

The long and winding road—back to peak employment

Only four states—Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana—have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession. A couple more, New York and West Virginia, are expected to return to their prerecession peak later this year. However, according to Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight, the majority [...]

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The strange case of Leo Strauss

Should we care about the work of Leo Strauss, even if there is no there there? Kenneth B. McIntyre explains why we should: When writing about the work of an academic historian or philosopher—as opposed to a polemicist, a politician, or a popularizer—there is an obvious threshold question with which to begin: is the writer’s [...]