• Tony Atkinson
• David Autor
• Dean Baker
• Keith Banting and John Myles
• Jared Bernstein and Greg Mankiw
• Rebecca Blank
• Heather Boushey
• Sheldon Danziger
• Brad DeLong
• Richard Freeman, Branko Milanovic, and Tyler Cowen
• David Grusky (and critics)
• Jacob Hacker
• Lane Kenworthy
• Paul Krugman and Robert Solow
• Ive Marx
• Larry Mishel
• Robert Reich
• Emmanuel Saez
• Tim Smeeding
• Joe Stiglitz
• Larry Summers (also this)
• Mark Thoma
• Janet Yellen
• Erik Wright

Tim Smeeding knows more than virtually anyone about inequality and poverty in the United States and other rich nations. I asked him what he recommends to reduce income inequality. His response:

1. Tax appreciated assets when inherited or transferred inter-vivos.
2. Raise income tax rates on capital income — capital gains and dividends — to levels just below labor, e.g. maximum rate at true current marginal tax rate or 30%. And curtail practices of defining earnings as capital income, e.g. “carried interest” provisions.
3. Reduce political rents: close tax loopholes that benefit mainly the wealthy (e.g. cap on deductions for employer-provided health insurance); turn deductions that benefit the richest into credits, many refundable, to benefit lower- and middle-income families; allow drug purchases at “best price” rates, not market rates, for Medicare; get rid of oil and gas exploration tax subsidies; limit and phase out agricultural subsidies.
4. Use tax revenue to improve public infrastructure (including internet).
5. Improve college prep classes and college counseling for students.
6. More and better apprenticeships (get employers involved).
7. Raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour, index it, and enforce labor laws (e.g. on scheduling).
8. Universal child allowance at $2,500 per child, refundable if this is more than income taxes owed, and separate from the EITC.
9. Profit sharing among all long-term (full year or more) employees.

A set of posts I wrote for Crooked Timber in 2009:

• What’s the problem?
• Are unions the answer?
• Education to the rescue?
• Put the brakes on globalization?
• Boosting incomes in the bottom half
• Expand and improve public services
• What to do about the top 1%
• How to pay for it

What is the “Nordic model” and where is it headed?

How to get wages rising (UK edition)

Models and data in economics

What is “reform conservatism”?

Is Republican Party extremism sustainable?

What a radical conservative government might want to do

How can we get wages rising?

How much has wealth inequality increased?

How progressive are America’s taxes?

Do employment-conditional earnings subsidies boost employment and incomes? My new paper is available here.

This has become a hot topic, prompted by, among other things, the launch in November of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, President Obama’s inequality and mobility speech in early December, and Ezra Klein’s recent comments. My current thinking is here.

That’s the title of my essay in the January-February 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs. You can read it at foreignaffairs.com. It’s free; you simply have to register. Here’s the opening:

Since March 2010, when U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the ACA has been at the center of American politics. Tea Party activists and their allies in the Republican Party have tried to stymie the law at nearly every turn. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted more than 40 times in favor of repealing or defunding it, and last October the House allowed a partial shutdown of the federal government in an attempt to block or delay the law. The controversy surrounding the ACA shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Obamacare, as the law is commonly known, is the most significant reform of the U.S. health-care system in half a century. It aims to increase the share of Americans who have health insurance, improve the quality of health insurance plans, and slow the growth of health-care spending. But the fight over the law is about more than just health-care policy, and the bitterness of the conflict is driven by more than just partisan polarization. Obamacare has become the central battleground in an ongoing war between liberals and conservatives over the size and scope of the U.S. government, a fight whose origins stretch back to the Great Depression and the New Deal….

The ACA represents another step on a long, slow, but steady journey away from the classical liberal capitalist state and toward a peculiarly American version of social democracy. Unlike in, say, northern Europe, where social democracy has been enacted deliberately and comprehensively over the years by ideologically self-aware political movements, in the United States, a more modest and patchy social safety net has been pieced together by pragmatic politicians and technocrats tackling individual problems. Powerful forces will continue to fight those efforts, and the resulting social insurance policies will emerge more gradually and be less universal, less efficient, and less effective than they would otherwise have been. But the opponents are fighting a losing battle and can only slow down and distort the final outcome rather than stop it. Thanks to a combination of popular demand, technocratic supply, and gradually increasing national wealth, social democracy is the future of the United States.

That’s the title of my new book. It’s available from Oxford University Press, amazon (the kindle version is just $10 and looks nice), and other booksellers.

You can read the introductory chapter for free. Jared Bernstein, Tyler Cowen, Jacob Hacker, and Reihan Salam were kind enough to write blurbs.

The “Improving Poverty Reduction in Europe” (ImPRovE) project, funded by the EU, aims to enhance understanding of what works in reducing poverty and increasing social cohesion. Information about the project and slides from the presentations at its first conference, held a short while ago in Brussels, are available here.

See here.

Over the past several years a large group of researchers in Europe, the U.S., and a few other countries have been looking at the rise of income inequality and its social, cultural, and political impacts. A number of working papers are available from the project’s webpage. One on the United States is here.

I too hope that this succeeds.

An excellent data set, now updated: cwed2.org.