The over-supplyside economy

Daniel Alpert explains why the economy ain’t what it used to be:

We are in an age of global oversupply: an oversupply of global labor (hence high underemployment); an oversupply of global productive capacity (hence ultra-low inflation); and an oversupply of global capital (hence low interest rates)….

[O]ne can’t properly understand the financial crisis without appreciating how the rise of the emerging nations distorted the economies of rich countries. And you can’t chart a course to more growth and stability in the developed world without recognizing that many of these distorting forces are still at work. Cheaper credit through monetary easing, for example, doesn’t yield much in an era when cheap capital already exists in abundance.

Can we get out of this mess? We can, but we need a fresh playbook.

Read his Times op-ed piece here.

Share the Work

Writing in The Guardian, Dean Baker explains that there’s more than one way to skin the unemployment cat:

The average worker in Germany and the Netherlands puts in 20% fewer hours in a year than the average worker in the United States. This means that if the US adopted Germany’s work patterns tomorrow, it would immediately eliminate unemployment.

Read his piece here.

For more on work and time in America, check out Take Back Your Time.