Reading Book Club discussion

How Can We Make The Economy Work Again?

Jobs numbers are up. Wages are not. It’s time for some serious thinking about how our economy is working. We’ll do it.

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2015/01/13/ec...

Guests

David M Kotz, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Author of the new book, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, among many others.

Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Business. Co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the books The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Co-author with Adam Saunders of Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy (@erikbryn)

From Tom’s Reading List

The Wall Street Journal: Hiring Booms, but Soft Wages Linger – ” A reversal in wages—after hints of a pickup in the prior month—highlighted the labor market’s struggle to gain sufficient vigor to sustain stronger economic growth. Economists typically expect a rapidly falling unemployment rate—to 5.6% in December from 6.7% a year earlier—to deplete the pool of existing workers and spur competition among employers, reflected in higher wages.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-adds-...

Washington Post: ‘The Second Machine Age,’ by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – “Brynjolfsson’s and McAfee’s optimism springs from the idea of exponential growth — in the computing power of machines, in the amount of digital information that is being created and in the number of relatively cheap devices that are continually talking to each other. When these numbers doubled every year or two in the early days of the computer revolution, the results, while impressive, were still within our ability to imagine. But now that the numbers are so staggeringly large, the authors argue that machines can finally do things once considered possible only in the realm of science fiction.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinion...

The Economist: The onrushing wave — “Economists take the relationship between innovation and higher living standards for granted in part because they believe history justifies such a view. Industrialisation clearly led to enormous rises in incomes and living standards over the long run. Yet the road to riches was rockier than is often appreciated.”

http://www.economist.com/news/briefin...