By Steve Roth Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to further pillage […]
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By Steve Roth You often hear calls out there — mostly from Right economists but also from some on the Left — for a consumption tax in the U.S. As presented, it’s a super-simple idea: […]
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By Steve Roth Should government guarantee a “good” job for anybody who wants one? It’s one of the biggest ideas among progressive economists who are trying to seize the Overton window of what’s politically feasible, […]
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By Steve Roth Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company makes […]
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By Steve Roth “Printing money.” You hear it all the time in economics discussions — from economists in every phylum of the (rapidly) evolving field, from financial types, from reporters and everyday news consumers, and […]
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By Steve Roth It’s the American dream. A third of Americans think they’ll be rich someday. More than half of 18–29 year olds think they will be. Less than 5% actually make it.* And many of those […]
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By Steve Roth In the next evolution of economics taking shape around us and among us, perhaps no school has been so transformational over recent decades as a loose, worldwide group best described as “accounting-based” economists. Modern […]
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By Steve Roth Households save money and lend it to businesses, who invest it in productive enterprises. That’s the economic story you’ve been hearing your whole life, right? Or at least since Econ 101. Saving […]
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By Steve Roth In the millennias-long evolution of human societies and economic systems, we find ourselves today at a pass where three systems predominate, and fitfully cohabit: democracy, capitalism, and socialism. Most countries in the world operate […]
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By Steve Roth “This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are […]
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By Steve Roth In 2013, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson — no wild-eyed liberals, they — asked a very important question: Why has the U.S. economy performed better under Democratic than Republican presidents, “almost regardless […]
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By Steve Roth Capitalism concentrates wealth. Ridicule Marx and his latter-day disciples all you like (I’ll help); he definitely got that right. But capitalism is a big word with lots of meanings, and enough ideological baggage to […]
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By Steve Roth Fourteen. Trillion. Dollars. That’s how much the U.S. government “owes.” You hear that massive number all the time, right? And people are forever telling you that you and your family are on the hook to pay […]
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By Steve Roth In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling […]
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By Steve Roth If you save more, if everybody collectively saves more, there are more savings, right? There’s more money that firms can borrow and invest to make us all more prosperous. Household saving “funds” […]
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By Steve Roth The standard definition of income makes much of rich people’s income invisible. If your home or stock-portfolio value goes up over a decade or three, have you received “income”? It sure as […]
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By Steve Roth Like it or not, if countries want to join the “rich country-club,” they need to redistribute wealth. What has not been studied much — at least partially because the data is hard […]
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By Steve Roth You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions […]
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By Steve Roth There’s a curious fact about the wealth and growth of nations that you rarely see mentioned: No country has ever joined the modern, high-productivity, rich-country club without massive doses of redistribution, and […]
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