From the Everett Herald: While watching Congress and the president wrangle over the fake crisis of raising the debt ceiling, the Department of Agriculture reported that 45.8 million Americans now receive food stamps to help purchase food. That’s one out of every seven Americans. In our state more than 1 million people now depend on […]
Increase the minimum wage to spur economic growth
February 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment
By Michael Reich | The Herald News While debates about how to promote jobs and economic growth while tackling the deficit have dominated the political conversation for the past year, an effective strategy for boosting the economy without increasing government spending or adding a dime to the debt has been largely ignored: raising the minimum […]
Group-think caused the market to fail
June 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment
EOI board member Stan Sorscher takes a an insightful look at a new form of market failure: “group-think”: Markets are powerful and efficient. Markets fail. Engineers study failure. When we design a structure or a system, it is our professional obligation to account for known failure mechanisms, and produce a robust, practical, safe design. We […]
Econ 101: Market failures
June 8, 2010 By 1 Comment
As comfortable as we are with the strengths of market capitalism, we are uneasy and uncertain about its failures: millions of home foreclosures, rising wealth inequality, steady de-industrialization of the US economy, long-term unemployment, threats to the environment, and health care costs that rise without bound. We can collect conventional mechanisms for market failure into […]
