Dems’ Job Guarantee Isn’t Nearly as Easy as It Sounds [feedly]

Moderator: Sometimes Baker is disingenuous to a perplexing degree. No one ever said the guaranteed job program would be "EASY". But neither is living in this economy, for the 40 million workers making less than 15$.

It is true that a government employer of last resort wage DOES become the BOTTOM wage. Thus, in order to afford, or implement it, the wage will have to start LOW. That caused, for example, Bill Green of the AFL in the thirties to OPPOSE the Roosevelt public works projects -- which actually inspired the Levy Institute, since they were key recommendations of economist Hyman Minsky, and JM Keynes drawing lessons from the Great Depression.

Dems' Job Guarantee Isn't Nearly as Easy as It Sounds
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/dems-job-guarantee-isn-t-nearly-as-easy-as-it-sounds

Dean Baker
The Daily Beast, April 27, 2018

See article on original site

There has been a surge of interest in the last year in the idea of a government job guarantee.

A number of economists associated with the Levy Institute at Bard College and University of Missouri at Kansas City have long pushed the idea. In recent months, several potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have publicly raised the idea, including senators Corey Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, and of course Bernie Sanders, who has fully endorsed it.

While the idea of guaranteeing a decent paying job to every worker who wants one is appealing, it is likely to prove a difficult lift in implementation. A guaranteed job would radically transform the labor market in a way that could put tens of millions of workers on the public payroll. This would almost certainly put many low-wage employers out of business and raise the costs to consumers of services like restaurants, haircuts, and house cleaning. It also effectively gives the government direct responsibility for allocating workers across regions.

The basic issue is that the program is designed to guarantee all people decent pay through their work. The problem is that this guarantee will not only provide an opportunity to those currently unemployed or under-employed; it would provide a better option for tens of millions of workers who already have jobs.

A key issue here is determining the number of people who might opt for this public program. That will depend on the wage rate. In the plan being pushed by the Levy Institute (politically, most closely associated with Sanders), the wage rate is $15 an hour. This is around the 25th percentile of the wage distribution, meaning that 40 percent of the workforce, or roughly 40 million workers, now gets less.

The proposal also calls for health-care insurance equivalent to that received by federal employees. This would make the plan attractive to even more low-wage workers, most of whom do not get employer-provided health-care benefits. In addition, government jobs are likely to offer job security and protection against abuses by an employer, like sexual harassment, which is yet another reason why they may prove attractive to workers in the private sector.

"A Federal Reserve Board committed to a 2.0 percent inflation target would send interest rates soaring in response to this rise."

Given the number of workers who currently are paid less than the $15 an hour proposed wage, plus health care benefits that are worth at least $4 an hour, it might be that 10 million workers would leave private sector jobs for a guaranteed federal job.  And that's a conservative estimate; it could quite possibly be more than 20 million. With 10 million or so unemployed and underemployed workers, we are likely talking about having at least 20 million people in the program and perhaps over 30 million.

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Currently the federal workforce, excluding the Postal Service. is 2.2 million, so this is increasing the number of workers employed by the federal government by a factor of at least ten. The proposal calls for the program to be administered at the state and local level. This also presents issues (many of these governments have serious corruption problems), but even using state and local employment as a denominator, we would still be talking about doubling current levels.

It requires some serious faith in government to think that this sort of leap in employment levels can be well-managed if done in a short period of time. It doesn't help that many of these workers will have little education and job experience.

There is also the issue of what happens in the private sector. The opportunity to get a public-sector job, with health-care insurance, paying $15 an hour, effectively imposes a floor on wages in the private sector. If we say that 50 million people now earn less than this package (the median wage is around $23 an hour – 80 million workers earn less), and the average gap is $4 an hour, then the additional cost to matching this wage in the private sector will be roughly $350 billion a year (this calculation assumes 1750 hours per worker and 50 million workers).

That sum comes to roughly 1.8 percent of GDP. There also has to be some spillover effect. Workers who had been earning $16 or $17 an hour will have to see some bump in pay when the pay for those at the bottom jumps to $15 from levels that are currently as low as $7.25 an hour. If 20 million workers are in the bump range, and they get an average pay increase of $2 an hour, that raises the cost by another $70 billion, putting the total at $420 billion, or 2.1 percent of GDP.

And this brings us to inflation. As a first approximation, this 2.1 percent figure would be the impact on the level of prices, although it would be dampened by reduced profit margins and increases in productivity. In any case, a Federal Reserve Board committed to a 2.0 percent inflation target would send interest rates soaring in response to this rise.

But even if the Fed can be controlled, this rise in pay for those at the bottom will mean a reduction in living standards for those higher up. They will have to pay more for restaurants and haircuts, as well having their house cleaned and their lawn mowed.

Most of us won't shed any tears for the "hard to get good help" crowd, but if we haven't taken steps to weaken their economic power—which won't be easy because they are powerful—we can expect to see doctors, lawyers, and other high-end earners getting pay hikes to protect their living standards. This is a story of serious wage-price spiral, unless we introduce other measures.

None of this means we should reject a job guarantee out of hand. We can start with a lower wage and limit the program to long-term unemployed, or in other ways restrict the size. But we should also look to measures to weaken the economic power of those at the top. It is government policies, like restricting the entrance of qualified foreign doctors and allowing pension funds that pay private equity partners to lose them money, not laws of economics, that gives us a situation where doctors get $260,000 a year, hedge fund boys over a million, and CEOs more than $20 million. Reversing these policies will open the door for much higher pay and living standards for those lower down the income ladder.

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Data Workers of the World Unite

Data Workers of the World Unite

by Eric Posner, Glen Weyl




With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, authors of the forthcoming book Radical Markets, propose looking to the power of organized labor. A data workers' (that is, social media users') labor union, they argue, could help check the offenses of the digital platforms.

 

Editors' note: In advance of next week's panel discussion "Radical Markets and the Captured Economy" at the Stigler Center, we offer this extract from chapter 5 of Weyl and Posner's Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

 

Many aspects of the story we have told [in previous chapters] are unique to present technology and the norms that have developed around the Internet. However, the idea that monopsonistic power created by technologies with strong economies of scale would lead to undercompensated labor and thus retard both economic development and equality is not a new one. It is one of the classic themes of economic history and the central idea of the most famous economic historian of them all, Karl Marx.

 

A central intellectual aim of Marx's 1867 first volume of Das Kapital was to explain why the wealth and well-being of proletarians (workers without property) had, as of the mid-nineteenth century, improved so little since the end of feudalism.¹⁾ Marx claimed to identify a necessary tendency of capitalists to "exploit" workers by holding their wages below the value they generated. Marx argued that these labor practices created what his collaborator Friedrich Engels called a "reserve army of the labor" (that is, a class of unemployed) whose even more squalid condition would persuade workers to do anything to maintain their jobs.²⁾

 

As economist John Roemer showed, Marx's conclusions are extremely unlikely to prevail if employers compete for workers.³⁾ However, they are exactly what one would anticipate in a world where capitalists conspired with each other, or had sufficient unilateral power, to hold down wages. Beatrice and Sydney Webb, a dynamic pair of late nineteenth-century British Radicals, advocated collective bargaining by workers, arguing that it would make production more efficient by raising wages above the levels that drove workers out of the labor force.⁴⁾ John Kenneth Galbraith, the mid-twentieth-century American economist […], hailed unions as a necessary form of "countervailing power" required to balance the power of monopsonists.⁵⁾

 

This view has been partly vindicated by the research of subsequent economists. Economic historian Robert C. Allen shows that prior to the emergence of unions, British wages during the early process of industrialization hardly advanced at all despite improvements in technology.⁶⁾ Once unions managed to counter the monopsony power of British industrialists, not only did wages quickly increase, but the pace of overall productivity radically accelerated. Economists David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, and Suresh Naidu believe that the breaking of monopsony power through labor unions, government labor regulation, minimum wages, and other reforms was critical to the further acceleration of productivity.⁷⁾ Beyond their role in collective bargaining, unions served other functions that helped support the "Fordist" mode of assembly line–based production that prevailed in the twentieth century: they screened and guaranteed the quality of the work produced by their workers and helped them learn the skills required by a rapidly changing work environment.

 

To be sure, many other things were happening at the same time, making it difficult to trace clear lines of historical causation. Unions also brought many inefficiencies and rigidities, caused strikes, and may themselves have accumulated significant market power. The hostility they attracted and the extent to which they became inflexible and outmoded has led to their decline in the last several decades.

 

Yet even as unions have declined, some of the conditions we describe above have important resemblance to the conditions that helped stimulate their growth and benefits. The monopsony power of siren servers, we have argued, may be holding down wages for data laborers at 0 (or more precisely at the value of the services and entertainment these laborers derive from using digital services). This may suppress the productivity of the digital economy by reducing the quality and quantity of data and contribute to the maldistribution of gains from AI technologies. An individual data worker lacks bargaining power, so she cannot credibly threaten to withdraw her data from Facebook or Google unless she receives a fair reward.

 

Furthermore, to realize the gains from data as labor, data workers will need some organization to vet them, ensure they provide quality data, and help them navigate the complexities of digital systems without overburdening their time. These triple roles, of collective bargaining, quality certification, and career development, are exactly the roles unions played during the Industrial Age.

 

[The] triple roles, of collective bargaining, quality certification, and career development, are exactly the roles unions played during the Industrial Age. It may be time for "data workers of the world (to) unite" into a "data labor movement."

It may be time for "data workers of the world (to) unite" into a "data labor movement."⁸⁾ A striking feature of the data labor market is that it is an international market, one that is almost completely unaffected by borders and government regulation. Once people awaken to their role as data laborers—obtain a "class consciousness," if you will—organizations (sort of like unions) may emerge to supply data laborers with the means to engage in collective action. Imagine, for example, a data labor union that solicited members—the data laborers—by promising them higher payments for their data. Once the union obtained a critical mass, it could approach Facebook or Google and threaten a "strike" (also, effectively, a boycott because data laborers are simultaneously consumers of Facebook's and Google's services). The technical details would be complex, but we can imagine a range of possible approaches.

 

The union could simply call on its members to stop using Facebook or Google for a day if the companies do not negotiate. A more complicated approach could involve routing data labor through platforms set up by the union, so that the union could disrupt the supply of data if and when the Internet companies on the other side refused to pay reasonable wages. A Facebook user would reach her Facebook account through the union's platform, so that the union could enforce collective action among users by shutting down the account or providing limited access to the account for the duration of the strike. At present, an Internet Service Provider could organize such an action, though it would need to structure itself as a labor union to avoid antitrust charges.

 

The very network effects that entrench digital monopolies would work against them in this scenario: it would be embarrassing to break a Facebook strike if all your friends were striking on the same day.

It seems to us that these unions could be effective. Unlike traditional unions, they combine labor stoppages and consumer boycotts—because, as noted, data laborers are simultaneously consumers. During a strike, Facebook would lose not only access to data (on the labor side) but access to ad revenues (on the consumer side). It's as if autoworkers could pressure GM or Ford not only by stopping production but also by refusing to purchase cars. Also unlike traditional unions, which must struggle to maintain solidarity during strikes, the data unions could enforce the "picket line" electronically. Furthermore, the very network effects that entrench digital monopolies would work against them in this scenario: it would be embarrassing to break a Facebook strike if all your friends were striking on the same day.

 

Finally, a data labor union might help foster digital competition by breaking the stranglehold on data of a few of the most powerful siren servers. The unions might find it optimal to share data between many different digital companies, rather than causing it to accumulate in one place. Of course, there are downsides as well—data unions, like traditional unions, might abuse their authority. However, we believe that at the present time, in light of the absence of any market—Radical or otherwise—in data labor, the gains exceed the losses.

 

Eric A. Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His many books include The Twilight of Human Rights Law and Climate Change Justice (Princeton).

 

E. Glen Weyl is principal researcher at Microsoft and visiting senior research scholar in economics and law at Yale University.

 

Disclaimer: The ProMarket blog is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Blog Policy.  

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Krugman: Trumps war on the poor

Trump's War on the Poor

Paul Krugman

America hasn't always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there's something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still, we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben Carson's insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.

And this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.'s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.

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That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

Even the administration's de facto financial deregulation — its systematic gutting of consumer financial protection — should be seen largely as an attack on the least well off, since poor families and less educated workers are the most likely victims of exploitative bankers.

The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why.

Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it's hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover, there's good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don't: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance.

For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn't just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

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The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.

What about the idea that anti-poverty programs create a "poverty trap," reducing the incentive for people to work their way to a better life? That's a very popular notion on the right. But the reality is that there are very few Americans getting food stampsor Medicaid who could and should be working but aren't.

It's true that some calculations indicate that means-tested programs — programs available only to those with sufficiently low incomes — can create disincentives for working and earning. But the evidence suggests that while safety net programs have some adverse effect on incentives, it's a much smaller effect than many policymakers believe.

Furthermore, we could reduce those disincentives by making programs more generous, not less — providing more aid to the near-poor rather than less aid to the poor. Somehow, conservatives never seem to consider that option.

So what's really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren't punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, "Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory." And I guess you can see where that comes from. After all, he's a self-made man who can't attribute any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

The Winners and Losers Radio Show

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CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST:Inequality in US Life Expectancy

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Blog: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST
Post: Inequality in US Life Expectancy
Link: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2018/04/inequality-in-us-life-expectancy.html

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Trump Plan to Raise Minimum Rents Would Put Nearly a Million Children at Risk of Homelessness [feedly]

Trump Plan to Raise Minimum Rents Would Put Nearly a Million Children at Risk of Homelessness
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-plan-to-raise-minimum-rents-would-put-nearly-a-million-children-at-risk-of-homelessness-0

Under President Trump's proposal to raise rents by up to $1,800 a year on the poorest households receiving federal rental assistance — virtually all of which have annual incomes of less than $7,000 — roughly 1.7 million people (including nearly 1 million children) would face eviction, hardship, and homelessness.

The proposal would raise rents on people receiving rental assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in several different ways. One is by raising the "minimum rent" for assisted households. Currently, assisted households generally must pay 30 percent of their income for rent. Public housing agencies, however, may require households to pay a minimum rent of up to $50 per month, and households in Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance pay a minimum rent of $25 per month — even if that exceeds 30 percent of their income. The Trump proposal would raise the monthly minimum rent for any household with an adult younger than 65 who is not considered disabled to at least $152 and make it mandatory. That would triple the rent for affected households now paying a $50 minimum. (The proposal would set the minimum rent at $50 for households where all members are 65 or older or have a disability, including in the supportive housing programs for the elderly and people with disabilities, which now have no minimum rent.)

The $152 minimum rent proposal would affect only the poorest people receiving federal rental assistance, raising rents on some 1.7 million people, including 970,000 children. The number of children in severe poverty has grown substantially since the mid-90s, in part because the safety net's erosion for families with children has left many such families with little or no income when they're jobless. Many of the other affected adults have been homeless or may have physical or mental health conditions, or limited education, that make it difficult to find or sustain employment.

The typical affected household is a mother with two children with an annual income of $2,400 — just $200 per month. After paying rent under this proposal, the family would have only $48 for necessities like clothing, personal care items, diapers, or school supplies, as well as food or medical needs that aren't met by other assistance.

 

While affected families may be eligible for hardship exemptions from having to pay the higher minimum rent, very few assisted families receive such exemptions in practice. Households have to request an exemption, but eligible households may not know that exemptions are available or how to apply if the housing agency doesn't adequately publicize the policy. There's little reason to expect that to change under a higher minimum rent policy, as HUD has not complied with a 2016 congressional directive to certify that existing protections are being enforced.

A $152 mandatory minimum rent would put the lowest-income families and individuals at risk of eviction and even homelessness, which is particularly harmful to children. Rental assistance programs are designed to help low-income families rent decent housing at an affordable cost. This proposal does the exact opposite by raising the rent on the most vulnerable HUD-assisted households.

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Recovery Radio:Recovery Radio -- Progress IS POSSIBLE!

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Recovery is POSSIBLE

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Roach:America’s Weak Case Against China [feedly]

America's Weak Case Against China
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ustr-section-301-report-biased-by-stephen-s--roach-2018-04

The US Trade Representative appears to have made an ironclad case against China in the so-called Section 301 report issued on March 22. But the report – now widely viewed as evidence justifying the Trump administration's recent tariffs and other punitive measures against China – is wide of the mark in several key areas.

NEW HAVEN – On the surface, United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer appears to have made an ironclad case against China in the so-called Section 301 report issued on March 22. Laid out in a detailed 182-page document (which, with 1,139 footnotes and five appendices, would make any legal team blush with pride), the USTR's indictment of China on charges of unfair trading practices regarding technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation seems both urgent and compelling. It has quickly been accepted as foundational evidence in support of the tariffs and other punitive trade measures that President Donald Trump's administration has initiated against China in recent months. It is powerful ammunition in a potential trade war.


But don't be fooled. The report is wide of the mark in several key areas. First, it accuses China of "forced technology transfer," arguing that US companies must turn over the blueprints of proprietary technologies and operating systems in order to do business in China. This transfer is alleged to take place within the structure of joint-venture arrangements – partnerships with domestic counterparts which China and other countries have long established as models for the growth and expansion of new businesses. Currently, there are more than 8,000 JVs operating in China, compared to a total of over 110,000 JVs and strategic alliances that have been set up around the world since 1990.

Significantly, US and other multinational corporations willingly enter into these legally-negotiated arrangements for commercially sound reasons – not only to establish a toehold in China's rapidly growing domestic markets, but also as a means to improve operating efficiency with a low-cost offshore Chinese platform. Portraying US companies as innocent victims of Chinese pressure is certainly at odds with my own experience as an active participant in Morgan Stanley's joint venture with the China Construction Bank (and a few small minority investors) to establish China International Capital Corporation in 1995.

Yes, as we joined with our partners in creating China's first investment bank, we shared our business practices, proprietary products, and distribution systems. Yet, contrary to the assertions of the USTR, we were hardly forced into these arrangements. We had our own commercial objectives and wanted to build a world-class financial services firm in China. By the time we sold our stake in 2010 – at a rather attractive return to Morgan Stanley shareholders, I might add – CICC was well on its way to attaining those goals.

The second area where the USTR's Section 301 report is problematic is its portrayal of China's focus on outward investment – its "going out" strategy – as a unique state-directed plan aimed at gobbling up newly emerging US companies and their proprietary technologies. In fact, the report devotes more than twice as many pages to charges concerning China's supposed external technology theft via such acquisitions – which are framed as a blatant grab for America's most precious assets – as it does to internal transfers through JVs and alleged unfair licensing practices.

As such, the Made in China 2025 campaign is presented as prima facieevidence of a devious socialist plot to attain global dominance in the great industries of the future: autonomous vehicles, high-speed rail, advanced information technologies and machine tools, exotic new materials, biopharma and sophisticated medical products, as well as new power sources and advanced agricultural equipment.


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Never mind that industrial policies are a time-tested strategy for developing countries seeking to avoid the dreaded middle-income trap by shifting from imported to indigenous innovation. China is accused by the USTR of sponsoring a unique strain of state-directed, heavily subsidized industrial policy unfairly aimed at snatching competitive supremacy from free and open market-based systems like the US, which are supposedly playing by different rules.

Yet even developed countries have relied on industrial policy to achieve national economic and competitive objectives. It was central to Japan's so-called planned rational development state, which underpinned its rapid growth in the 1970s and the 1980s. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry perfected the art of state-subsidized credit allocation and tariffs to protect Japan's sunrise industries, an effort that was matched by Germany's equally impressive Wirtschaftswunder, augmented by strong support for the Mittelstand of small and medium-size enterprises.

And, of course, it was US President Dwight Eisenhower who in 1961 drew attention to America's powerful military-industrial complex as the linchpin of state-sponsored, taxpayer-funded innovation in the US. NASA-related spinoffs, the Internet, GPS, breakthroughs in semiconductors, nuclear power, imaging technology, pharmaceutical innovations, and more: all are important and highly visible manifestations of industrial policy the American way. The US simply does it though its federal defense budget – where outlays of close to $700 billion this year are more than the combined total earmarked for defense in China, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.

Yes, the USTR is entirely correct in underscoring the role that innovation plays in shaping any country's future. But to claim that China alone relies on industrial policy as a means toward this end is the height of hypocrisy.

Cyber-espionage is the third leg of the stool in the USTR's case against China. In this area, there can be no mistaking the evidence underscoring the role played by China's People's Liberation Army as a major actor in cyber intrusions directed at US commercial interests. These problems were, in fact, so serious that President Barack Obama presented top-secret evidence of state-sponsored computer hacking to President Xi in September 2015. Since then, most reports point to a reduction in Chinese incursions. Unfortunately, the evidence cited in the USTR report in support of cyber-related trade violations largely predates that confrontation.

In short, the USTR's seemingly impressive Section 301 report is a biased political document that has further inflamed anti-China sentiment in the US. As a result, Chinese-sponsored intellectual property theft is now taken as a given by an America that increasingly sees itself as a victim. Yes, like the rest of us, the Chinese are tough competitors, and they don't always play by the rules. For that, they need to be held accountable. But the case made by the USTR is an embarrassing symptom of a scapegoat mentality that has turned America into a nation of whiners.

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STEPHEN S. ROACH

Writing for PS since 2011 
88 Commentaries

Stephen S. Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management. He is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China.

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