Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Tom Palley has made a significant contribution to understanding the meaning and significance of neoliberalism. This chronicle collects some of his best work to explain how global adoption of neoliberal policies over the past thirty years has increased income inequality and created tendencies to stagnation.

In recent decades Japan has changed from a strongly growing, economically successful nation regarded as prime example of social equality and inclusion, to a nation with a stagnating economy, a shrinking population and a very high proportion of elderly people. Within this, new forms of inequality are emerging and deepening, and a new model of Japan as 'gap society' (kakusa shakai) has become common-sense. These new forms of inequality are complex, are caused in different ways by a variety of factors, and require deep-seated reforms in order to remedy them. This book provides a comprehensive overview of inequality in contemporary Japan. It examines inequality in labour and employment, in welfare and family, in education and social mobility, in the urban-rural divide, and concerning immigration, ethnic minorities and gender. The book also considers the widespread anxiety effect of the fear of inequality; and discusses how far these developments in Japan represent a new form of social problem for the wider world.

An innovative approach to measuring inequality providing the first full integration of distributional and macro level data for the US.

A Financial Times Book of the Year “The strongest documentation I have seen for the many ways in which inequality is harmful to economic growth.” —Jason Furman “A timely and very useful guide...Boushey assimilates a great deal of recent economic research and argues that it amounts to a paradigm shift.” —New Yorker Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Decisions made over the past fifty years have created underlying fragilities in our society that make our economy less effective in good times and less resilient to shocks, such as today’s coronavirus pandemic. Many think tackling inequality would require such heavy-handed interference that it would stifle economic growth. But a careful look at the data suggests nothing could be further from the truth—and that reducing inequality is in fact key to delivering future prosperity. Presenting cutting-edge economics with verve, Heather Boushey shows how rising inequality is a drain on talent, ideas, and innovation, leading to a concentration of capital and a damaging under-investment in schools, infrastructure, and other public goods. We know inequality is fueling social unrest. Boushey shows persuasively that it is also a serious drag on growth. “In this outstanding book, Heather Boushey...shows that, beyond a point, inequality damages the economy by limiting the quantity and quality of human capital and skills, blocking access to opportunity, underfunding public services, facilitating predatory rent-seeking, weakening aggregate demand, and increasing reliance on unsustainable credit.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “Think rising levels of inequality are just an inevitable outcome of our market-driven economy? Then you should read Boushey’s well-argued, well-documented explanation of why you’re wrong.” —David Rotman, MIT Technology Review

The book examines how the outgrowth of the financial industry has contributed to the recent tendencies towards inequality and stagnation. It proposes a monetary interpretation of these events using a Classical–Keynesian theoretical approach derived from the work of Keynes and Sraffa. The approach moves from the distributive conflicts among economic and social groups, presuming that they influence the legislation shaping the organisation of the markets and the policy of the authorities. It argues that the degrees of liquidity of assets, which reflect the individual perceptions of their future prices, ultimately depend on the organisation of the markets and policy decisions. The development of his work persuaded Keynes that it was necessary to revolutionise the scientific foundations of economic discipline to effectively interpret events and recommend policies. He consequently introduced in 1932 a monetary theory of production. Following these lines, Sraffa proposed in Production of Commodities to take the rate of interest as an independent variable in the theory of distribution. Using the Classical–Keynesian approach, the book shows how the changes in legislation and policies since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreements have caused the outgrowth of finance and how these alterations have raised financial instability. It identifies various competitive mechanisms through which financial events can affect income distribution and growth, describing how they have triggered the recent tendencies towards inequality and stagnation. This book is essential reading for researchers studying the interactions among financial markets, distribution, and growth.

In light of weak economic performances and rising income disparities across the developed world during the past decades, this book provides a comprehensive overview of secular stagnation theories in the history of economic thought and examines the role of income distribution in various stagnation hypotheses. By offering a historical perspective, from the classical economists to the most recent stagnation debate of the early twenty-first century, the author shows that most stagnation theories were developed in periods of high and/or rising income disparities. Eventually, it was Josef Steindl, one of the least recognized stagnationists in the history of economic thought, who put the distribution of income at the heart of his stagnation theory. While Josef Steindl focused on the nexus between the functional distribution of income and economic growth, this book includes the personal distribution of income in a Kaleckian-Steindlian model of economic growth and stagnation. In the model presented, the nexus between economic growth and the distribution of income is a priori uncertain, depending on the type of economic shock and the specific economic circumstances. The author also discusses various empirically oriented policy implications aimed at fostering both economic growth and a more equal distribution of income. This book appeals to scholars in economics and the history of economic thought interested in economic growth, secular stagnation, and income distribution.

Examines the trend of Americans away from the traditionally mobile, risk-accepting, and adaptable tendencies that defined them for much of recent history, and toward stagnation and comfort, and how this development has the potential to make future changes more disruptive. --Publisher's description.

The gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the United States and is now at its widest since at least the early 1900s. While by most measures the economy has been improving, soaring cost of living and stagnant wages have done little to assuage economic anxieties. Conditions like these seem designed to produce a generation-defining intervention to balance the economic scales and enhance opportunities for those at the middle and bottom of the country’s economic ladder—but we have seen nothing of the sort. Nathan J. Kelly argues that a key reason for this is that rising concentrations of wealth create a politics that makes reducing economic inequality more difficult. Kelly convincingly shows that, when a small fraction of the people control most of the economic resources, they also hold a disproportionate amount of political power, hurtling us toward a self-perpetuating plutocracy, or an “inequality trap.” Among other things, the rich support a broad political campaign that convinces voters that policies to reduce inequality are unwise and not in the average voter’s interest, regardless of the real economic impact. They also take advantage of interest groups they generously support to influence Congress and the president, as well as state governments, in ways that stop or slow down reform. One of the key implications of this book is that social policies designed to combat inequality should work hand-in-hand with political reforms that enhance democratic governance and efforts to fight racism, and a coordinated effort on all of these fronts will be needed to reverse the decades-long trend.

The first step-by-step introduction to the methodology of agent-based models in economics, their mathematical and statistical analysis, and real-world applications.