Category Archives: Economy

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The End of Ownership: Why Aren’t Young People Buying More Houses?

The decline in young home owners is a puzzling trend. Interest rates have steadily declined over the last 30 years. Mortgage lending has loosened. Women have ascended in the workplace and supplemented their spouse’s earnings. How in the face of all of these positive developments did home ownership among the young keep falling?

The world is going to be an interesting and potentially painful place for the next few decades, as older generations learn that their assumptions about how the world works don’t hold true for younger generations.

“What do you mean you don’t want to own a house? Everyone wants to own a house!”

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The Book of Jobs

For the past several years, Bruce Greenwald and I have been engaged in research on an alternative theory of the Depression—and an alternative analysis of what is ailing the economy today. This explanation sees the financial crisis of the 1930s as a consequence not so much of a financial implosion but of the economy’s underlying weakness. […] The underlying cause was a structural change in the real economy: the widespread decline in agricultural prices and incomes, caused by what is ordinarily a “good thing”—greater productivity.

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Why conservatives can’t get people to work hard

A winner-take-all society is not very conducive to hard work; I’m not going to bust my butt for 30 years for a 1% shot at getting into The 1%. But I am going to bust my butt for 30 years if I think this gives me a 90% chance of having a decent house, a family, some security, a reasonably pleasant job, a dog, and a couple of cars in my garage.

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Maybe you are working class

A 2004 study by the Drum Institute for Public Policy put the middle class as [between] $40,000 and $95,000, even as people all over the income map also argued to be put in this category.

Yet:

If you have a household of 4, you can be classified as “needy” by the federal government and qualify for WIC if you make up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or $40,793.

The definition of “middle class” has expanded so much that the term is now mostly meaningless. That’s because most people want to think they’re in the middle class.

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Obama says that the rich have stopped paying taxes, and they have. But why have we allowed them to do this? The answer is simple: the Big Lie of our generation is that one day we will be the rich, and therefore we keep and feed the Rich as if they were exotic game animals, letting them get away with murder because of our secret aspiration to one day be one of them.

Vinay Gupta, “On the Practical Exercise of Power – or why the Old White Dudes keep winning”

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Is Undercover Boss the Most Subversive Show on Television?

Thirty years ago top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of 30 times what their workers did — now they make 300 times what their workers make.

That’s the kind of statistic a show like Undercover Boss can put flesh and blood on. Here are a few others:

  • Since 2000, 3.2 million more American households are trying to make do on under $25,000 a year.
  • In 2005, households in the bottom 20 percent had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20 percent made $159,583 — a disparity of 1,500 percent, the highest gap ever recorded.
  • In 2007, the top ten percent pocketed almost half of all the money earned in America — the highest percentage recorded since 1917 (including, as Henry Blodget notes, 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the “roaring 1920s”).

[…]

Those are ugly trends, but Americans still want to believe otherwise. Over 60 percent of parents think that their children will have a higher standard of living than they have. And over 70 percent believe that drive and hard work play a bigger role in economic mobility than external factors, such as the income of parents.