A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 3 “Then Many of Us Shot Up the Blade of a Hockey Stick” After establishing the last chapter that industrialization led to technological change growing output faster than population for the first time in human history, we return to the idea of the Great…
Tag: Income Inequality
Historically, Poor was Normal
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 1 “The World is Pretty Rich, But Once was Poor” In my teaching and research, I keep coming back to the question of why an economy grows, with the hope of that knowledge helping those that don’t. Dr. Deirdre McCloskey wrote a trilogy of books…
It Was Never Only About Profits
A Discussion “The Social Responsibility of Business: Milton Friedman Reconsidered” As an economics professor, I know I have some misconceptions to overcome every semester a new crop of students appear in my intro microeconomics course. Economics is about greed. It is immoral. Capitalism is bad. Elrick and Thies (2018) offer…
Increasing Market Power Leading to Increasing Inequality
A Discussion of “Market Power, Inequality, and Financial Instability” Two economists from the Federal Reserve have put out a paper that is exactly what I think economics should look like. What do I mean? Cairo and Sim (2020) identify six problematic trends in our macro economy since 1980, trying to…
