ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
The recent weeks have obliged me to unearth some research I had hoped could stay on the backburner. In 2023, I wrote about the major forms of democratic erosion facing the United States: election subversion and executive aggrandizement. “Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy,” I noted, “if they eliminate governmental ‘checks and balances’ or consolidate power …
“People feel that the economy is rigged against them,” says University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “We need to design an economy that feels fairer to people,” she says. “This is the challenge of our times. It is at the heart of our political battles and at the heart of a lot of anger.” Stevenson …
The world has never worked the way economists may wish. Today, though, the world seems to represent the antithesis of everything Zhu Min believes and has worked toward, whether during his long tenure at the top of the IMF or at the heart of the policy debate in Beijing. The IMF, like Zhu himself, has …
The COVID-19 pandemic is shining an unforgiving spotlight on the many inequalities in the United States, demonstrating how pervasive they are and that they put the nation at risk for other systemic shocks. To stop the spread of the virus and emerge from a crushing recession, these fundamental inequalities must be addressed. Otherwise not only is a …
Ever since the Transatlantic slave trade ramped up in the 17th century, the African continent has had a tough time economically and socially. But around the mid-1990s, the momentum shifted. Over the past two decades, the size of Africa’s economy, as a whole, increased by 50 percent in contrast to a world average of 23 …
Everyone participates in the social contract every day, and we rarely stop to think about it. Yet social contracts shape every aspect of our lives, including how we raise our children and engage in education, what we expect from our employers, and how we experience sickness and old age. All of these activities require us …
A defining feature of the American Dream is upward mobility—the ability of all children to have a chance at economic success, no matter their background. Unfortunately, children’s chances of earning more than their parents have declined in recent decades. Whereas 90 percent of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents, only half …
Like the rest of us, Harvard labor economist Lawrence F. Katz has been thinking about how artificial intelligence (AI) will change the future—especially what it will mean for inequality. Since the 1980s, he has made groundbreaking contributions to economists’ understanding of the issue and what can be done about it. Under one AI scenario, Katz …
In 2012 the famous French actor Gérard Depardieu moved his home across the border to Belgium to avoid paying a hefty surtax on incomes over 1 million euros. The ease with which Depardieu avoided taxes made international news. A young French economist named Gabriel Zucman followed the events with avid interest, as he had recently …
For decade after decade in the United States, children typically stayed healthier and lived longer than the generation that came before them. The country, it seemed to Anne Case, had been doing something right. By the late 1960s, advances in vaccines and antibiotics had helped extend the average American lifespan to nearly 70, about 50 percent longer than …