The lead opinion piece in The Hindu (Indian Newspaper), “The Governance Dashboard: The BJP Regime and its Promises,” makes visible the failures of BJP regime, writes Vamsi Vakulabharanam, economics and Sripad Motiram (UMass, Boston). This article draws from the recent book ” A Quantum Leap in the Wrong Direction?” edited by Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty (UMass PERI), Srinivasan Ramani and Dipa Sinha.
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-governance-dashboard/article26763433.ece
A new study published by researchers at UMass Amherst, Leiden University, Netherlands and Rutgers University has found that nations offering more rights to lesbian, gay and bisexual people enjoy significantly higher per capita GDP than those who trail in LGB equality, and that nations fostering exclusion of LGB people are causing harms to their economies. The study, “The Relationship between LGBT Inclusion and Economic Development: Macro-Level Evidence,” appears online in the journal World Development. “All over the world LGBT people face discrimination in the labor market, harassment and bullying in education and stresses that harm their health. This treatment diminishes their ability to contribute to the economy, and the economy suffers when countries fail to recognize their rights,” says lead author M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and public policy at UMass Amherst and distinguished scholar at the UCLA Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy. (Phys.org, 4/10/19; News Office release)
Medicare-for-all is the only plan that will control health care costs and provide universal coverage, writes Gerald Friedman, economics. Friedman says that other plans, like “Medicare for America” and “Medicare Extra for All,” are not reasonable because they keep the inefficient private insurance and multipayer systems. (USA Today, 4/8/19)
People often look at the gender pay gap in simplistic terms, says Nancy Folbre, professor emerita of economics. She says they apply incomplete explanations, like placing blame all on employers for discriminating against women, or assuming that all women have different priorities than men. (CNBC, 4/2/19)
Nancy Folbre, Professor Emerita of Economics, was among eight economists interviewed by CNBC for U.S. Equal Pay Day (Women had to work through April 2, 2019, an additional three months, to equal men’s 2018 average annual earnings.) Other economists interviewed included Claudia Goldin (Harvard University), Heidi Hartmann (President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research), and Gary Burtless (Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution).
“8 economists on what people don’t understand about the gender pay gap—and if it can actually be closed”
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)
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.