Maybe "Django Unchained" will win at the Golden Globes* tonight?
Dylan Matthews gets the award for the first news item on the new paper on wage inequality (still in draft form) from my former boss Larry Mishel, colleague John Schmitt, and friend Heidi Shierholz. Mishel, Schmitt, and Shierholz (MSS) take issue with the job polarization explanation of wage inequality, put forward most prominently by M.I.T. professor David Autor. Autor's claim is that the pattern of inequality we have seen over the last three decades can be explained in large part by a loss of middle class jobs, with gains in employment for occupations at both the top and bottom end of the wage distribution.
...
The other point is one of motives. Matthews quotes Autor:
"Larry and people in that group hate technical change as an explanation of anything. My opinion about why they hate it that much is that it’s not amenable to policy, ...All these other things you can say, Congress can change this or that. You can’t say Congress could reshape the trajectory of technological change."
While Mishel has made it fairly clear that he considers the technical change argument to be an excuse for not addressing the real causes of inequality, it is possible to turn the question of motives around. The view that inequality is simply the result of technical change and there isn't much we can do about it has plenty of rich and powerful adherents.--------------------------------------
*hosted by favorites Tina Fey and Amy Poheler.
No comments:
Post a Comment