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on Post Keynesian Economics |
| By: | Jon D. Wisman |
| Abstract: | It is commonplace for contemporary American politicians to characterize as ideal the values prevalent during the early US Republic, ignoring that many critical socio-economic conditions that undergirded those values longer ago ceased to exist. Those conditions were radically altered during post-Civil War industrialization as increasing members of American society lacked independent status as owners in control of the resources and tools with which they worked. They were forced to work for others, suffer the humiliation of being bossed about, and the threat of unemployment. This degrading of work weakened democratic values, eroded community, transformed the household, and gave rise to the consumer culture that so irked Thorstein Veblen. This article, after examining the nature of work in pre-industrial America, addresses the subsequent process of proletarianization. It then details how the debasement of work transformed political values, weakened communities, altered the household, and steered worker families to increasingly seek status through consumption rather than through work and community, thereby eventually threatening environmental devastation. The final section addresses how two reforms – guaranteeing employment at living wages with reskilling where necessary and implementing measures to extend freedom and democracy into the workplace – could enable the U.S. to recapture the security, worker freedom, and community that pre-dated industrialization. These reforms are necessary for preserving democracy and avoiding ecological Armageddon. The political feasibility of these two reforms is that they would preserve capitalism, retaining its two most fundamental social institutions of private property and markets, albeit without exploitation and degraded work. |
| Keywords: | Debased labor, political values, guaranteed employment, workplace democracy. |
| JEL: | E21 E44 G01 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2026-01 |
| By: | Andrea Boitani (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Maurizio Franzini |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between economic inequality, growth and social welfare, challenging the conventional identification of welfare with GDP and the widespread assumption that greater equality necessarily entails lower growth. An Atkinson-type social welfare function is first adopted in which welfare increases with average income and decreases with inequality. Using stylised income distributions broadly reflecting the contemporary United States and the more egalitarian Scandinavian economies of the 1980s and 1990s, it is shown that faster growth in a highly unequal economy may generate less welfare than slower growth in a more equal one. Progressive taxation combined with uniform transfers increases welfare, even when redistribution involves substantial efficiency losses of the kind represented by Okun’s “leaky bucket”. Dynamic simulations further indicate that a more unequal but faster-growing economy may require several decades to reach the welfare level of a more egalitarian, slower-growing economy; progressive taxation significantly shortens this convergence period. Finally, an alternative welfare measure is introduced, which is based on individual aversion to disadvantageous inequality, whereby welfare depends partly on the income gap relative to the richest group. Under this approach, aggregate welfare may rise while the welfare of the bottom 90 % declines, thereby undermining conventional applications of both the Kaldor–Hicks compensation principle and the Pareto criterion. |
| Keywords: | Economic inequality; Social welfare; Economic growth; Progressive taxation; Inequality aversion. |
| JEL: | D63 I31 O40 H24 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctc:serie1:def156 |
| By: | Daniel Aaronson; Mark Borgschulte; Sunny Liu; Bhashkar Mazumder |
| Abstract: | Does education lead to political activity? We find that a large, early 20th century school construction program, the Rosenwald schools, led to more NAACP branches in the rural South starting in the early 1940s, i.e. prior to the classic U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Branch growth was stronger where Jim Crow occupational segregation prevented Black men from realizing some of the economic gains of their education. Our findings lend support to theories emphasizing that economic context can act as a critical mediator in determining whether human capital causes political engagement. |
| JEL: | I20 J71 N32 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35842 |
| By: | - |
| Abstract: | The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has proposed 11 vital transformations for the region to advance towards more productive, inclusive and sustainable development, and advocates more effective management of these transformations in areas such as the technical, operational, political and prospective (TOPP) capabilities of institutions, governance, spaces for social dialogue and political economy. At its fortieth session, in 2024, ECLAC focused its analysis on three transformations: how to achieve stronger, sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth; how to reduce inequality and foster inclusion and social mobility; and how to promote sustainability and address climate change. At this forty-first session, discussions will focus on three other transformations, selected for their relevance in the new international and geopolitical landscape: the digital transformation and the use of artificial intelligence for productive development; a new phase of regional integration; and macroeconomics for development built on sound and strong fiscal policy. |
| Date: | 2026–09–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecr:c39025:90369 |
| By: | Daniel Robert Kling Alexander; Catherine Louise Kling |
| Abstract: | Many of the questions now put to large language models have no correct answer to score against: what a policy is worth, which option a user should choose, how to weigh competing values. Stated-preference economics has faced this problem for decades. It judges survey responses without knowing the true value, through a framework of validity and related concepts: content, construct, and criterion validity, reliability, incentive compatibility, and consequentiality. We argue that this framework is a general method for evaluating language models, and we set out what each concept means for LLM evaluation. We demonstrate the approach using a published water-quality stated preference economic valuation survey (Vossler et al. 2023) administered to six models. In this economic application, the validity tests take the form of predictions from economic theory: demand should slope down, and willingness to pay should respond to the scope of the good and to income. The tests separate the models sharply. Two older models fail the most basic test at a household income level of \$75, 000, and the two newest pass every test of theoretical validity we can score, but diverge on convergent validity. Passing validity tests shows that a model's answers are coherent, not that they are correct. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.10506 |
| By: | Canh Thien Dang; An Nguyen |
| Abstract: | Experimental studies of generative AI in education mostly report average effects, yet field evidence shows that AI can narrow attainment gaps or widen them. We argue that the direction depends on the judgement burden, the expertise a learner must supply to screen AI output before learning from it, and that expert verification before release moves this burden from students to an accountable tutor. We test the argument in a two-cohort difference-in-differences design in which one half of a compulsory firstyear university economics course received AI-generated podcasts, FAQs and quiz-based study guides, produced with a source-grounded model and checked by a named graduate teaching assistant (170 students; 340 examination marks). Access was associated with a 2.34-mark advantage on a 50-mark component. The share of marks below the upper-second classification boundary fell by 24.7 percentage points relative to the counterfactual, effects were significant at every threshold from 23 to 31 marks and at none above, and roughly three-quarters of the average originated in the bottom quintile. The threshold estimate is robust to removing the lowest-scoring students from the pre-intervention cohort; the average effect is not. Interviews and feedback from 36 students indicate that the verification label gave students a reason to engage with AI-generated material without ending their scrutiny of it. Evaluations of AI learning resources that report only mean effects cannot detect whether the students the resources are meant to help are the ones who gain. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.07097 |