Allison J. Pugh — What Happens at Home When People Can’t Depend on Stable Work

My research, involving men and women who experience varying levels of job insecurity, suggests that the dampening expectations they have for employer commitment requires them to moderate the kinds of feelings they allow themselves to have in the event of a layoff. This is especially true for less-educated workers, who are most likely to say they could lose their jobs in the next year.…

So when we talk about work today, we have to talk about it in the context of an unrequited contract, our collective acquiescence to the notion that work can no longer be counted on....

Wake-up from a sociologist. The psychological impact of job insecurity can be devastating, as is shown in health and suicide statistics such as cited by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

JG to the rescue.

Harvard Business Review
What Happens at Home When People Can’t Depend on Stable Work

Allison J. Pugh is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a 2016-17 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as a 2016-17 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow

Nobel Laureates — Eliminating Rent Seeking and Tougher Antitrust Enforcement Are Critical to Reducing Inequality

Eliminating rent seeking and toughening enforcement of antitrust laws are “critical” to reducing rising inequality, said two Nobel Laureates, Angus Deaton and Joseph Stiglitz, during a panel of Nobel laureates last Friday. Two fellow laureates, Roger Myerson and Edmund Phelps, echoed their message and warned of a return to 1930s-style corporatism.

“To the very considerable extent that inequality is generated by rent seeking, we could sharply reduce inequality itself if rent seeking were to be somehow reduced,” said Angus Deaton, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics. Deaton described inequality in the U.S. as being primarily driven by industry rents, and rejected proposals to increase taxes on the rich as a way to reduce rent seeking.

“I don’t think that rent seeking, which is incredibly profitable, is very sensitive to taxes at all. I don’t think taxes are a good way of stopping rent seeking. People should deal with rent seeking by stopping rent seeking, not by taxing the rich,” he said.

The panel was part of the annual Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA) meeting in Chicago. Fellow Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 prize, offered a more sympathetic view of higher taxes on the rich as a method to reduce inequality, but stressed the importance of rent-seeking to the rise in inequality in the U.S....

Rent extraction is made possible by asymmetric power. The way to reduce rent-seeking is to level the power. Symmetrical power is an assumption of neoclassical economics as the basis of free markets that are fair.

But markets are not naturally symmetrical because societies are structured on the basis of class and power is distributed asymmetrically as matter of social structure.

The problem in addressing rent this way is that this was a key insight of Marx. So anyone proposing such a solution is bound to be attacked as a 'Marxist," "socialist," or 'communist." Most people capable of making difference don’t' want to go there, at least alone, and no one wants to go first.

Pro-Market
Nobel Laureates: Eliminating Rent Seeking and Tougher Antitrust Enforcement Are Critical to Reducing Inequality

Michael Roberts — The end of globalisation and the future of capitalism

Must-read. Michael Roberts looks at capitalism in terms of the global economy.

I have been emphasizing for some time that the only closed economy is the global economy and therefore it is "the economy." Speaking of the "the economy" of regions and counties where "the economy" is open is very imprecise without tracing the tentacles, which is complicated and difficult to do and makes simple modeling intractable.

Michale Roberts' Blog
The end of globalisation and the future of capitalism

Michael Roberts

Bill Mitchell — The neo-liberal race to the bottom is destroying communities and killing workers

I have been reading an interesting book – The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America – by US journalist – George Packer – which traces the evolution of America over the period from 1978 to 2012. It is about how Americans have been dudded by the system they economic and political system that they hold dear to their hearts and how the core institutions that condition those beliefs have declined (changed) in the face of the rising dominance of the investment banksters. I am not so much interested in American history as I am the metamorphosis of Capitalism and the impact it has had on the working class. The book created a number of thought strands, which ultimately, led me to an interesting article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (published December 8, 2015) – Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century – by Princeton University academics Anne Case and Angus Deaton. What we learn is that the neo-liberal race to the bottom in advanced nations is destroying communities and killing workers.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The neo-liberal race to the bottom is destroying communities and killing workers
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Yves Smith — Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs

The underlying pathology is not hard to describe: employers (enabled by the Fed which has since the 1980s been only too wiling to provide for higher levels of unemployment so as to curb labor bargaining power to keep inflation tame) have succeeded in eliminating labor bargaining power. That program has been aided and abetted by the popularization of libertarian ideologies, which encourage many to see themselves as more in charge of their destiny than they are and thus see success and failure as the result of talent and work, as opposed to circumstance.…

More on precarity and the Anne Case and Angus Deaton study, too.

Naked Capitalism
Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs
Yves Smith

Nick Bunker — Rising U.S. mortality and its potential economic causes

Rising insecurity or couch-potato-itis?

WCEG — The Equitablog
Rising U.S. mortality and its potential economic causes
Nick Bunker