Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Privatization Failed — Even the Tories Are Admitting It

The first time I got on a Northern Train, I was rained on inside the carriage thanks to a hole in the roof. Virgin Trains will forever hold a place in my heart as the worst rail firm I ever had the misfortune to use, but friends commuting daily using Northern hated the company beyond […]

The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an `Aberration’

Ten years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed. When […]

Democrats are moving past neoliberalism — and to this view instead

It doesn’t require a lot of digging to wonder whether the laissez-faire, free market mantra of the past several decades has worked out as promised: Stock prices and corporate profits have far outpaced wage growth in the United States; lax antitrust enforcement has set the path toward enormous amounts of corporate concentration, often to the […]

How We Got Here and Where We’re Going: Neoliberalism Has Failed, and a New Progressivism Is on the Rise

At a time when corporate profits are sky-high, workers’ wages remain flat, and affordability crises run rampant, many are beginning to understand that the neoliberal ideal has not only failed to deliver shared prosperity but has harmed the collective good and driven us to a second Gilded Age. For four decades, neoliberals have argued that […]

The Jobs Market Isn’t as Healthy as It Seems

A hallmark of the U.S. economy’s record expansion has been steady growth in employment. Judging from the jobless rate, in fact, the labor market is the best it’s been in half a century. But what is missing in the focus on the numbers is a severe and troubling deterioration in the quality of jobs created. A close look at labor trends […]