Why Should We Care About Rising Inequality?

March 6, 2013

I’ve been asked this question by a few people recently, none of them hardhearted let-them-eat-cakers. If I’m hearing them right, they’re asking two simple yet profound questions: Why should we care if those at the top have a lot (and more all the time), as long as those at the bottom have enough? And because [...]

Read the full article →

Yes, This Post is About Me Speaking at TED…

February 22, 2013

… and I apologize for that. But I am pretty excited. I guess my TEDxBoston tryout last year was good enough to get me called up to the big leagues. I’ve never been to the main conference, so have no idea what to expect. Recent descriptions of TED seem to be either wet kisses or [...]

Read the full article →

Robots and Jobs: Freud and Tenure?

February 8, 2013

I normally like Catherine Rampell’s economics reporting and blogging at the New York Times a lot, but I had a problem with her article in last week’s Sunday Review. It was called “Raging (Again) Against the Robots,” and it made the accurate point that concerns about technological unemployment are nothing new. Where Rampell lost me [...]

Read the full article →

Is the Job Situation Improving, Holding Steady, or Getting Worse? Yes.

February 1, 2013

The BLS announced January jobs data today, so using my invaluable assistant FRED I added the latest updates to three long-term data series that measure employment: The employment rate (in green), which is simply 100% minus the commonly reported unemployment rate (which rose a tick to 7.9% in January 2013). Of the total population of [...]

Read the full article →

The Myth of the Myth of Technological Unemployment

January 23, 2013

Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a post titled ‘The Myth of Technological Unemployment‘ accompanied by a graph showing that hours worked in the US have been rising and falling in lockstep with output. He writes Machines are replacing workers, in other words, but they’ve been doing so since the cotton gin and the spinning [...]

Read the full article →

Join Us This Friday in San Francisco

January 15, 2013

Erik Brynjolfsson and I, with the great help of colleagues at the MIT Center for Digital Business and Sloan School of Management, are putting on a conference this Friday, January 18, in San Francisco. The theme is ‘MIT and the Digital Economy;’ we’re going to talk about work that’s been done at the Institute to [...]

Read the full article →

60 Minutes, How Many Jobs?

January 15, 2013

My colleague and Race Against the Machine co-author Erik Bynjolfsson and I were part of the 60 Minutes story “March of the Machines” that aired last night. I was really pleased with the piece. Reporter Steve Kroft and producers Maria Gavrilovic and Harry Radcliffe did a great job telling a complex story without trivializing it, [...]

Read the full article →

TickTickTickTick… March of the Machines

January 12, 2013

Just a quick note to let everyone know that 60 Minutes is running a story tomorrow called “March of the Machines” about “technological advances, especially robotics, that are revolutionizing the workplace, but not necessarily creating jobs.” Steve Kroft sat down with me and my Race Against the Machine co-author Erik Brynjolfsson, and our interview will, [...]

Read the full article →

Labor’s Lost Leverage

January 9, 2013

Here’s a graph I assembled over at the invaluable FRED showing how corporate profits (as a percentage of GDP) and labor’s share of income (essentially the percentage of GDP paid out in wages) have been doing over the post-war era in America. At this point, it’ll surprise few people to learn that labor share is [...]

Read the full article →

The Great Decoupling of the US Economy

December 12, 2012

If you were in charge of the economy, you’d probably care that it could produce a lot, that it had high productivity, that it provided lots of jobs, and that these jobs offered decent pay on average. You might well care about other things, too, but if these four indicators were all headed in the [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →