Joseph Stiglitz's The Price Of Inequality Is Required Reading

Joseph E. Stiglitz's recent (2012) book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, is a book about America's and Americans' current economic status that all Americans ages, oh, 15-85 should read. As you'll find at the link, Amazon offers it in paperback for under a sawbuck. (Do you know what a sawbuck is? Look it up if you're too young to have heard the term.) Or if you're like me and want to spend even less on it, go to your public library: system-wide, HPL has 10 print copies and one audio CD; I placed a hold on one of the print editions and it came to me in under 2 days. 

Did I mention that this book is a must-read for every intelligent, caring adult American?

Stiglitz visits many topics related to inequality: how inequality across American society is no accident but rather a result of a set of conscious policy choices, choices which at least in principle could be made in ways that have more egalitarian results, but which probably won't be pursued, absent pressure from sources not yet clear to me about a third of the way through the book. Sources of inequality... corporate and individual rent-seeking, tax policies favoring the well-heeled, disguised government gifts in one form or another, government institutions' often misconceived responses to the various bubbles the American economy has encountered (housing, tech, etc.), globalization in various forms, and financial deregulation... are all examined in terms of their consequences for the top 1% and the rest of us. If you're like me, you've run across all of these in print at one point or another, but never all together in one place; let me tell you, they have a powerful impact in combination that no one of them packs singly.

Did I mention that this book is required reading?

Last Official Jobs Report Before Election: Good News

"Persistent Economic Growth," says the NYT headline. This is good news for working Americans, indeed, for everyone except Republican office-seekers. Here's Catherine Rampell of the Times:

The nation’s employers added 171,000 positions on net in October, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and more jobs than initially estimated in August and September. Hiring was broad-based, with just nearly every industry except state government adding jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, but for a good reason: more workers joined the labor force and so officially counted as unemployed.

No doubt the ranting Right is howling its conspiracy theories about the BLS, but they can't do much about it now.

This is still not enough, and as Rampell points out, there's that fictional "fiscal cliff" to overcome in Congress to avert a Tea Party government shutdown. One is tempted to resort to Alice's solution (see recent post), but hey, at least one side has to act as if it's really a democracy, and if they are elected, we have to live with that.

A job! I think I remember what those are like...

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

The first two of the numbers everyone has been waiting for are in, and things look good for the home team. Shaila Dewan of NYT notes that the September unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, down from 8.1% in August. The new rate is the lowest in Obama's presidency. That's in spite of the "modest" increase in the number of jobs, 114,000 new jobs in September.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis

The RWNJs (no link from here; they're not hard to find) are about to shit their pants about this. Krugman points us to a CNBC post by Dan Fastenberg explaining how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) utterly and credibly rejects claims that the changes in employment numbers were falsified. Look: I've known a few federal civil service employees in my time. They have explained their conditions of employment to me, and one of the surest ways to get oneself fired from a decently paid, quite secure job is to tamper with research results for partisan purposes. That's not what happened here; the wing-nuts may as well get the twist out of their knickers.

So... beyond being accurate and correctly executed, is this report significant? does it mean good things for jobs in the marketplace? Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight says YES, and explains his reasons for saying so. Be sure to read past the break in his post for details. Note, in fairness, that Silver demonstrates that a drop in unemployment rate is historically uncorrelated to not a guarantee of an incumbent president's re-election.

But such a drop certainly puts a spanner in the works of Rmoney's determination to make his campaign about jobs (on Wednesday, for the first time I've heard). And considering the chaotic economic mess George W. Bush left for Obama to clean up, any sign of positive trending is welcome. Of course I'd rather see 5% unemployment; I suspect everyone except the wealthy bastards would prefer a lower unemployment number. But a consistently declining number is not bad.