Most of us are very familiar with the achievements and views of Bernie Sanders, the Senator, but not with the story and remarkable achievements of Bernie Sanders as a young man and, later, a mayor.
Here are two excerpts of articles about Sanders’ early years.
I was relieved after a very long period of mostly silence, interspersed with a few non-committal statements on the TPP, to read Professor Krugman’s blog post curated below. But that relief is tempered by the timing and temperature of this position statement. Continue reading Responding to Paul Krugman on Trust and the #TPP→
While the protests and riots in Baltimore in recent days were critically triggered by yet another death of a young black man interacting with the police, there are of course many other forces at work.
Mike Fletcher, a journalist at the Washington Post, has made important contributions to the poverty/economics beat in recent years. But Fletcher has also lived in Baltimore for decades, and his perspective on recent events is particularly germane.
I came across an excellent mash-up of segments from Martin Luther King’s speeches on poverty and the end of an interview of James Baldwin in PBS’ “The Negro and The American Promise.” These two men expressed, in ten minutes and fifty three seconds, far more than Thomas Piketty did in a seven hundred-page book. Continue reading MLK died warning us about inequality back in the 60’s | Social #Activism on Blog#42→
You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Build We Won’t |NYTimes→
For the past half-century or more, homeownership has formed the cornerstone of the American Dream. But ever since the economic crisis, America has been in the throes of a long-running Great Reset as it shifts gradually from homeownership toward renting. The number of “renter households” increased by more than half a million in 2013 according to a recent analysis on the state of the housing market from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
A recent post over at the economics blog Sober Look suggests that the shift is occurring faster than even I expected. This huge growth in the renting population means that, in the coming years, America’s housing crisis will have less to do with foreclosures and underwater homes and more to do with rental housing, as the supply of these units is falling far behind growing demand. Continue reading America’s Looming Rental Crisis – CityLab→
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