Daily Archives: June 23, 2013

Dr Alf’s Top Dozen – last week

June 23, 2013 By in Business Administration, Cyprus, Germany, People, Politics, Society Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

I thought that it would be interesting to share my top dozen blogs for last week, ranked by number of hits with most popular first:

  1. How the Revival of Postwar Germany Began – Bruce Bartlett – NYTimes.com
  2. Cadbury: The great tax fudge – FT.com
  3. The G8 Obama and Syria: Why Putin Came Out on Top – The New Yorker
  4. A Hard Look at the Effectiveness of the UK’s Political Class? – John Gelmini
  5. Dr Alf’s Two Cents: Junk food still marketed to children as companies bypass rules | Life and style | The Guardian
  6. Dr Alf’s Two Cents: Britain ought to be thankful for its political class – FT.com
  7. A Hard Look at the Effectiveness of the UK’s Political Class? – John Gelmini
  8. What will happen to markets when QE ends? | FT – Gavyn Davies
  9. Greg Mankiw and the Gatsby Curve – Paul Krugman – NYTimes.com
  10. A Hard Look at UK Defense Spending – John Gelmini
  11. The Trouble Within Islam by Tony Blair – Project Syndicate
  12. Time For ECB To Agree A New Plan For Cyprus – Forbes

Any thoughts?

We Were Middle-Class Once, And Young – Paul Krugman – NYT

June 23, 2013 By in Austerity, David Cameron, Democracy, George Osborne, Healthcare, People, Politics, UK, US Tags: , , , , , , , 22 Comments
Paul Krugman, Laureate of the Sveriges Riksban...

Paul Krugman, Laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 at a press conference at the Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This short blog from Paul Krugman is a GOOD READ. Check it out!

We Were Middle-Class Once, And Young – NYTimes.com.

I recommend that you follow the link in Krugman’s blog to  Miles Corack’s article (or open this link).

Look at Corak’s chart entitled “Great Gatsby Curve: More Inequality is Associated with Less Mobility across the Generations”. The UK is right up there, just behind the US in being the country with greatest income inequality. However, the UK and Italy have the highest inter- generational economic mobility (higher than the US); the latter term is defined as:

 Intergenerational economic mobility is measured as the elasticity between paternal earnings and a son’s adult earnings, using data on a cohort of children born, roughly speaking, during the early to mid 1960s and measuring their adult outcomes in the mid to late 1990s.

As I read these articles, my mind drifted to the UK where the current problems for the middle-classes are probably just as acute as the US. Let’s recap. The wealthy have gone from strength to strength. The unemployed and scroungers are protected by social safety nets. Meanwhile, the middle-class seem to have been abandoned.

This leads me to an interesting open question:

How should policy-makers help the middle-class to recover from austerity?

Any thoughts?

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