Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Paul Krugman

The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman
http://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393060691/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1473323-0180867?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190859915&sr=1-1

"stimulating manifesto aims to galvanize today's progressives"

From Paul Krugman's blog:

The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

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