Assuming that the boom ended in 2007, the new census data allows us to identify the big winners and losers in this business cycle. Obviously a high school or a…
Lou Uchitelle, in today’s NYT, has a front page article entitled “Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind.” In it he writes The opportunity to become abundantly rich is…
I’m an optimist, but I’m forced to admit that this has not been a good decade for young Americans. See my story here….
I like France. I’ve spent portions of my last two vacations there, (pictures available on request) and would happily go back there again, even with all the troubles. But I…
I’ve got a new article about the implication of the decline in labor’s share of national income across the industrialized world. Take a look at it. Here are the charts:…
Is a riskier society more mobile? Paul Krugman writes in today’s NYT that …economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are…
Here’s a little chart showing that at least some immigrants are still upwardly mobile. In 1995, families headed by immigrants who entered the country in the 1980s had a 26.6%…
Steve Antler at Econopundit responds to today’s article in the NYT about the widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us. This US “gap between richest and…
Okay, let’s throw this question open to everyone. In what ways are our lives (working/home) more risky than they were in 1979, and in what ways are they less risky?…
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting flashes of deja vu from the NYT’s multi-part series on class, followed by today’s WSJ story on consumer debt, with the headline “Lagging…
I’m coming back to the same point because it’s an important one: Absolute mobility matters more than relative mobility. *Absolute mobility means that living standards are increasing in absolute terms:…
There’s a lot of discussion about income mobility today, but most of it blurs the real facts. For example, Kevin Drum writes that life roles have become more hardened. While…
Would you rather live in a society with a lot of mobility but no wage gains, or a society with a bit less mobility and good wage gains?
Michael Mandel, BW's award-winning chief economist, provides his unique perspective on the hot economic issues of the day. From globalization to the future of work to the ups and downs of the financial markets, Mandel-named 2006 economic journalist of the year by the World Leadership Forum-offers cutting edge analysis and commentary.