Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy ...bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. InFault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
InFault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
Inequality is a charged topic. Measures of income inequality rose in the USA in the 1990s to levels not seen since 1929 and gave rise to a suspicion, not for the first time, of a link between radical ...inequality and financial instability with a resulting crisis under capitalism. Professional macroeconomists have generally taken little interest in inequality because, within the parameters of traditional economic theory, the economy will stabilize itself at full employment. In addition, enlightened economists could enact stabilizing measures to manage any imbalances. The dominant voices among academic economists were unable to interpret the causal forces at work during both the Great Depression and the recent global financial crisis. In Inequality and Instability, James K. Galbraith argues that since there has been no serious work done on the macroeconomic effects of inequality, new sources of evidence are required. Galbraith offers for the first time a vast expansion of the capacity to calculate measures of inequality both at lower and higher levels of aggregation. Instead of measuring inequality as traditionally done, by country, Galbraith insists that to understand real differences that have real effects, inequality must be examined through both smaller and larger administrative units, like sub-national levels within and between states and provinces, multinational continental economies, and the world. He points out that inequality could be captured by measures across administrative boundaries to capture data on more specific groups to which people belong. For example, in China, economic inequality reflects the difference in average income levels between city and countryside, or between coastal regions and the interior, and a simple ratio averages would be an indicator of trends in inequality over the country as a whole. In a comprehensive presentation of this new method of using data, Inequality and Instability offers an unequaled look at the US economy and various global economies that was not accessible to us before. This provides a more sophisticated and a more accurate picture of inequality around the world, and how inequality is one of the most basic sources of economic instability.
With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than ...they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.
What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we ...use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has economic meaning? What does it mean to measure inequality? Is it similar to National Income? Or price index? Is it enough just to work out the Gini coefficient? This book tackles these questions and examines the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economics, distributional analysis, and information theory. The book covers modern theoretical developments in inequality analysis, as well as showing how the way we think about inequality today has been shaped by classic contributions in economics and related disciplines. Formal results and detailed literature discussion are provided in two appendices. The principal points are illustrated in the main text, using examples from US and UK data, as well as other data sources, and associated web materials provide hands-on learning.
The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli ...Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the "distributional regime." The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.
It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such ...assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of inequitable growth, when they view the rich as prospering while opportunities for good jobs, fair pay and high quality education are restricted for everyone else. As a result, they favor policies to expand opportunity and redistribute earnings in the workplace, reducing inequality in the market rather than redistributing income after the fact with tax and spending policies. This book resolves the paradox of how Americans can express little enthusiasm for welfare state policies and still yearn for a more equitable society, and forwards a new model of preferences about income inequality rooted in labor market opportunities rather than welfare state policies.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and ...impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.
The biotic and abiotic factors responsible for determining ranges of most species are poorly understood. The Canada Jay (Perisoreus canadensis (Linnaeus, 1766)) relies on perishable cached food for ...over-winter survival and late-winter breeding and the persistence of cached food could be a driver of range limits. We confirmed that the Canada Jay’s lower elevational limit on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, matches that of the subalpine zone (900 m) and then conducted simulated caching experiments to examine the influence of antimicrobial properties of subalpine tree species (biotic) and of temperature (abiotic) on the preservation of cached food. We found that two high-elevation species, yellow cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis (D. Don) D.P. Little) and Amabilis fir (Abies amabilis Douglas ex J. Forbes), preserved cached blueberries and chicken flesh better than other trees, but they also occurred well below the lower limit of Canada Jays. The effect of temperature was similarly unclear; while food cached at 1150 m retained 17% more mass than food cached at 550 m, there was no difference in percent mass remaining of food placed 70 m above versus 120 m below the Canada Jay’s lower elevational limit. Thus, we were unable to provide definitive evidence that either of the proposed abiotic or biotic factors was responsible for setting thelower elevational limit of resident Canada Jays.
India has one of the fastest growing economies on earth. Over the past three decades, socialism has been replaced by pro-business policies as the way forward. And yet, in this 'new' India, grinding ...poverty is still a feature of everyday life. Some 450 million people subsist on less than $1.25 per day and nearly half of India's children are malnourished. In his latest book, Atul Kohli, a seasoned scholar of Indian politics and economics, blames this discrepancy on the narrow nature of the ruling alliance in India that, in its new-found relationship with business, has prioritized economic growth above all other social and political considerations. This thoughtful and challenging book affords an alternative vision of India's rise in the world that its democratic rulers will be forced to come to grips with in the years ahead.
The main features of the just society, as they would be chosen by the unanimous, impartial, and fully informed judgment of its members, present a remarkable and simple meaningful structure. In this ...society, individuals' freedom is fully respected, and overall redistribution amounts to an equal sharing of individuals' different earnings obtained by the same limited 'equalization labour'. The concept of equalization labour is a measure of the degree of community, solidarity, reciprocity, redistribution, and equalization of the society under consideration. It is determined by a number of methods presented in this 2005 study, which also emphasizes the rationality, meanings, properties, and ways of practical implementation of this optimum distribution. This result is compared with the various distributive principles found in practice and in political, philosophical, and economic thinking, with the conclusion that most have their proper specific scope of application. The analytical presentation of the social ethics of economics is particularly enlightening.
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