Poverty, Inequality and Opportunity

BY COURTNEY HAN The early 2000s was a heady time to be a researcher in Busia, Kenya. The town along Kenya’s western border was packed with young aspiring economists sharing group houses, waiting for roast meat at Chauma, the local eatery, and practicing Kiswahili with their Kenyan host families. They worked on projects ranging from […]

BY GRANT TUDOR September 25 marks the first anniversary of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a list of global ambitions for improving the state of things. The first is to “end poverty.” The goal’s various targets, which intend to elaborate on what exactly is meant by ending poverty, tell us that by 2030 all […]

BY BENJAMIN GILLIES This piece appeared in our 2016 print journal. You can order your copy here. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato argued that in order for a democratic society to function properly, the wealthiest members should never be more than five times as rich as its poorest.[i] Yet, in modern America, CEOs and other elites […]

BY ADAM LAROSE In an era of federal congressional gridlock and lack of movement on issues with the likes of immigration, budget resolutions, climate change, and gun regulation reform, it comes as no surprise that an increase in the federal minimum wage has been cast aside. The most recent and serious proposal came from the Obama […]

BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY, PANGYRUS This article is being published in collaboration with Pangyrus.   Sendhil Mullainathan had studied poverty for years, and something haunted him in nearly every study. Born into a small rural village in India, the Harvard behavioral economist and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship—commonly known as a “genius grant”—was inherently skeptical of […]

Educational Equity: Where We Are and Where We Need To Be Since 2001, Congressman Mike Honda has represented the 17th Congressional District of California in the U.S. House of Representatives. His district includes Silicon Valley, the birthplace of technology innovation and the leading region for the development of the technologies of tomorrow. First as a […]

Note: This is part 2 of a 2 part series. Read Brian’s first post here. Photo credit: Michael S. Williamson (source here). BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY Yesterday, we introduced the concept of the Great Decoupling – the idea that middle class income growth is no longer connected to the growth of the broader American economy. Today, we look […]

Jeffrey Sachs has a goal:  to end poverty in Africa by 2025, and according to Nina Munk, he is convinced that this can be done. Yet Munk’s account of what has come of the Millennium Village Projects, (Sachs’s brain child) tells of yet another foreign intervention in Africa that has left a lot to be desired, (at […]

BY TARA GRIGG GARLINGHOUSE New mothers have their pick of places to go for advice. Books, Web sites, parenting classes, and support groups address every aspect of raising a child, from what type of car seat to buy to what age the child should start playing Little League baseball. These resources coach new mothers on […]

BY ETHAN WAGNER “We must make our choice,” warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis nearly a century ago, writing on the state of American society. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few—but we can’t have both.”[i] A few years later, as Brandeis joined the U.S. Supreme […]

Abstract: Public policies to boost economic development in low-income countries or communities (LICs) are focused on either outward-oriented strategies (e.g. foreign technology transfer, tax incentives to attract foreign MNEs) or inward-oriented strategies based on expensive R&D expenditures. But such strategies are generally not viable in the context of LICs. This paper proposes an innovation strategy based […]

BY JAMES WALSH One of the painful lessons of the Great Recession has been that markets do not operate in a vacuum. They are influenced by a variety of external factors, including socioeconomic dynamics, norms of behavior, and institutions. Conversely, the market also has the capacity to shape our politics and society by creating and […]