A single-payer, “Medicare for all,” health insurance system in the U.S. could finance good-quality coverage for all residents while reducing health-spending by about 10 percent, writes Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of PERI. (Wall Street Journal, 3/28/19)
Month: March 2019
A columnist writing about the increase in the state minimum wage to $12 and its impact on Worcester and Central Massachusetts, says Arindrajit Dube, UMass Amherst economist, has written several papers that show raising the minimum wage helps decrease poverty. (Telegram & Gazette, 3/26/19)
A news story about how Medicare for All would abolish private health insurance, notes that Gerald C. Friedman, economics, has studied the plan proposed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and concludes it would save $6 trillion in health care spending over a decade. (New York Times, 3/23/19)
A weekly roundup of economic news from the United Kingdom includes a mention that Arindrajit Dube, economics, who will be reviewing the impact of the minimum wage for the government, offered a reflection on the work of Alan Krueger, an influential American economist who died last week. “If you believe that economics as a discipline should seek to answer questions about how the economy works through credible research and without ever substituting dogma for evidence, you owe an enormous debt to Alan Krueger,” Dube says. (Financial Times, 3/24/19)
The Devil Is in the Details: Implications of Samuel Bowles’s The Moral Economy for Economics and Policy Research
by Rachel Kranton
All economists should buy and read The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. The book challenges basic premises of economic theory and questions policies based on monetary incentives. Incentives not only crowd out intrinsic motivations, they erode the ethical and moral codes necessary for the workings of markets. Bowles boldly suggests that successful policies must combine incentives and moral messages, exploiting complementarities between the two. This essay argues that to achieve this objective, economists must study the local institutions and social context and engage untraditional data to uncover the interplay of incentives and identity.
An analysis of costs of the proposed Green New Deal quotes Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of economics, who says that he thinks it’s possible for the U.S. to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by spending about 2 percent of the gross national product each year, or around $18 trillion in total. Pollin says that the goal of getting to net zero in a decade — by 2030 — is completely unrealistic. (NBC 10 Boston, 3/14/19)
Gerald Epstein, economics, says universities should be more careful when their faculty engage in outside business activities. His comments are in an article examining the role that some faculty at other institutions have had in working with, and investing in, companies that sell controversial reverse mortgages. (Los Angeles Times, 3/14/19)
There is continued international coverage of the appointment of Andrajit Dube, economics, by the U.K. Treasury department to lead a review of the U.K.’s minimum wage policies. Dube’s academic work focuses on the effects of minimum wage on employment and income inequality. (Financial Times, 3/13/19; The Sun [U.K.], 3/14/19)
Arindrajit Dube, economics, writes an opinion piece in The Hill where he says using wage boards at the state and national level would be a tool to deal with income inequality. He says the boards would set industry standards for pay and that would help boost the pay of middle-income workers, much the same way that increasing the minimum wage helps low-wage workers. Dube has also been named by the U.K. Treasury Department to conduct a review of the international evidence on the impacts of minimum wages, with a particular focus on innovative and ambitious minimum wage models. The goal is to assess whether and how much the U.K. “national living wage” can be increased beyond the 60 percent of median wage target. (The Hill, The Telegraph [U.K.], 3/13/19)
In a GradHacker blog post, UMass Ph.D. candidate Neelofer Qadir notes that two other UMass economics graduate students, Devika Dutt and Narayani Sritharan, are part of a team that launched the “Diversify and Decolonise Economics” collective. (Inside Higher Ed, 3/13/19)