Shawn Fremstad's blog
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 13:37
- Dianne Stewart and Michael Lipsky, Public Capacity and Public Trust: "As our research at Demos reveals, too many people now see government only as polarized politics or as an undifferentiated, ineffective bureaucracy. The public has lost touch with the ways the quality of life of communities depends on government... [Our] work suggests several steps that can begin to create a more constructive climate... leaders can help citizens understand public systems and structures and the taxes that support them as necessary means to achieve the common good. Years of conservative rhetoric have ingrained in our national psyche the idea that the public good is best served by the dogged pursuit of private interest and that taxes merely deprive individuals and companies of their own money. While campaigning successfully to be governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick turned an opponent's demand to "give back" taxpayers' money into an appeal to people's innate sense of community. "It is their money," he declared during a debate, "but it's also their broken road. And it's their overcrowded school. It's their broken neighborhood and broken neighbor. ... It's not this idea that people earn what they earn and have no responsibility for the Commonwealth. We have a responsibility, in addition to personal responsibility, to take charge of shared responsibility.""
- Duncan Green, Well-Being v. Growth with Equity: What are the Pros and Cons?: "Well-being would reconnect us to the lived experiences of poor people. Some aspects of well-being – things like freedom from shame, humiliation and anxiety, may seem fuzzy to economists and the ‘measurement community’, but they are instantly recognizable to poor people themselves, and anyone who has spent time in poor communities. I also find it much more positive, human and engaging than the rather arid and legalistic language of rights and the ‘rights-based approach’, which can sometimes sound like little more than an endless series of complaints, and yet well-being covers much of the same ground as the rights framework."
- Daniel Little, Works Councils and US Labor Relations: "In most countries [other than the US] legislation establishes the opportunity or the mandate for a second form of worker representation within the workplace, the works council. Industry-wide unions establish wage levels; public policy stipulates the level of the "social wage"; and works councils provide an institutionalized context in which management and employees consult with each other, exchange workplace information, and work out firm-specific implementations of industry-wide agreements. And, as Kathleen Thelen demonstrates, differences in the institutions surrounding labor in a market society can have major effects on important social and economic factors in the societies in which they are embedded"
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 20:29
- Thorvaldur Gylfason and others, The Nordics in the Global Crisis: ".... the Nordic model itself contributes to resilience. The comprehensive safety net, one of the attributes of the Nordic model, has proved to be robust also in times of crisis. The entitlements are not tied to the fate of individual companies or particular markets, and risks are widely shared in the society. While forest plants are shutting down in Finland and car manufacturing is sharply contracting in Sweden, the governments are firmly rejecting requests for support of ailing industries. Still, there are no crowds protesting in the streets, largely because flexible work arrangements, based both on general and company-specific agreements between businesses and labour, alleviate a rise in unemployment. Structural change is enhanced by the employment protection legislation, which is more liberal than in most other EU countries. A well-educated labour force, another of the attributes of the Nordic model, facilitates adjustment by making it easier to upgrade skills through additional training. Provided that governments continue to be able to take the decisions needed to safeguard competitiveness and the sustainability of public finances, the Nordic model can be both robust and resilient. The Nordic model with its welfare state, labour market institutions and high rate of investment in human capital, is not the source of the current problems. On the contrary, the Nordic model, properly implemented, can be part of the solution."
- Don Peck, How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: "The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.....We are in a very deep hole, and we’ve been in it for a relatively long time already. Concerns over deficits are understandable, but in these times, our bias should be toward doing too much rather than doing too little. That implies some small risk to the government’s ability to continue borrowing in the future; and it implies somewhat higher taxes in the future too. But that seems a trade worth making. We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse."
- Dean Baker, Progressive Taxes Win Big in Oregon: "The political establishment continues to be obsessed with the victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race. In fact, they are so obsessed they managed to almost completely overlook the success of two important tax initiatives in Oregon the following week. Oregon voters passed by a margin of 54 to 46 a tax measure that would raise the tax rate on taxpayers with an income of more than $250,000 a year. They also approved a measure that would raise the tax paid by corporations in Oregon. Together the two measures are projected to raise $750 million over the next two years, approximately 5 percent of the state's $14 billon budget."
- The Onion, Wal-Mart Cuts Over 13,000 of What It Calls Jobs: "Retail giant Wal-Mart has announced in recent weeks that, effective immediately, it is cutting as many as 13,000 of what it somehow has the audacity to refer to as "jobs" from its corporate payroll. "Obviously, it is a sad day whenever we have to let go of any of the people we have dehumanized so thoroughly that we can barely muster the will to describe them as employees," Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke told reporters. "However, this is a business, and we must do what we can to stay competitive while still paying our existing workforce what we actually refer to with a straight face as wages.""
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 23:56
- Clay Risen, All Bark, No Bite: The Decline of Germany's Social Democrats: "On September 25, 2009, two days before Germany’s national elections, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) debuted its campaign mascot: the terrier. ... Terriers are wonderful animals and adored by Germans, but they hardly made for a compelling image of political fortitude. Nor, come that Sunday, did the SPD."
- Jonathan Heathcote and Fabrizio Perri, Economic Inequality During Recessions: "In 1992, Sweden experienced a severe recession that caused a dramatic increase in earnings inequality. However, inequality in total household pre-tax income and in disposable income (which includes taxes) barely moved. Compared to Sweden, the government in the US plays a smaller role, and taxes and transfers only partially offset widening earnings inequality in recessions. In particular, inequality in total household income [in the United States] increased during the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s."
- Alexander Gelber and Joshua Mitchell, Work in the Home and the Market: Understanding Single Women's Choices: "... our finding that the increase in market work corresponds largely to a decrease in housework suggests that public policies affecting labour force incentives may largely shift people from one productive activity to another. In a world of ideal data, we would also be able to observe the intensity with which they perform home and market work, and how much they value what they produce. Nonetheless, since the policy reforms we examine were motivated in part by decreasing the “unproductive” activity of “idle” single mothers, it is notable that the policies seem to have shifted individuals from work at home to work in the market."
- Edward Glaeser, Success of the Left in Europe, The Right in US: "Over decades, the success of the left in Europe and the right in the United States has led to wildly different beliefs about the nature of poverty and success. We found that 60 percent of Americans thought that the poor were lazy, while only 26 percent of European share that view. Fifty four percent of Europeans think luck determines income; only 30 percent of Americans concur. These differences don’t reflect economic reality. The American poor work longer hours than their European counterparts. They instead reflect the long-run ability of politics to shape public opinion. Institutions, like proportional representation, that empower the left do a good job of explaining which nations have opinions associated with the left, like the view that chance determines success."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 14:02
- David Cutler and Others, Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradiants: "The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking has declined more for the better educated, but not enough to explain the trend. Obesity has risen at similar rates across education groups, and control of blood pressure and cholesterol has increased fairly uniformly as well. Rather, our results show that the mortality returns to risk factors, and conditional on risk factors, the return to education, have grown over time."
- Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Traveling with the Dog: Greyhound and American Journeys: ".... bus travel remains a visible and viable working-class space. It is not ghettoized; it is public. In no sense off limits, it is in plain view. The Greyhound dog leaping across the skyline is a working-class flag. Praise the common man. If I keep going in this vein, I will end by suggesting that the resolution of all our political problems rests in a new itinerary for senators and congresspeople: let them ride the buses. But I risk giving the company too much credit. Greyhound hasn’t been a friend to its employees. The company has been the focus of two famous union strikes—in 1983 and in the early 1990s, both characterized by intense levels of acrimony, bitterness, and physical violence. During the upheaval of the 1990s, Greyhound called in nonunion bus drivers; in Redding, California, a picketing striker was killed by a bus driven by a strikebreaker. Greyhound eventually prevailed and effectively broke the bus drivers’ union. The striker’s death isn’t commemorated in any Greyhound station, as far as I know, giving the story the tragic air of the battles waged against the Wobblies in the early twentieth century. Ask the defeated strikers if the dog belongs on a working-class flag. Still, though the company is no self-conscious respecter of worker rights, the terminals remain community parks of the working class, with management, employees, and patrons trapped in a slightly abusive relationship."
- Joyce Foundation, New Tools in the Advocacy Toolkit: Microtargeting, Netroots Mobilization and e-advocacy: "Historically, policy advocates have effectively pressed their causes using compelling research, good ideas, and the right relationships. However, in the past few years, sophisticated issue advocates have increasingly begun to identify and mobilize supporters through a whole new suite of new media-anchored strategies and tactics, including microtargeting, social networking, and e-advocacy."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 02/01/2010 - 21:33
- Andrew Hahn, The Indianapolis Private Industry Council’s Cash Voucher Program for Disadvantaged Youth: "A promising six-year effort in Indianapolis made cash vouchers for emergency or compelling expenses available to participating community-based organizations (CBOs) and social service agencies to help their young adult clients pursue employment, education, and training goals. Since its inception, the Indianapolis Private Industry Council’s (IPIC) voucher program, with support from the Lilly Endowment, has provided over 2,400 young adults in its Youth Employment Service (YES) program with bill paying assistance. ... The IPIC initiative in Indianapolis has shown significant success in helping low-income youth succeed in school, job training, and work."
- Department of Labor, Secretary Hilda Solis Presents DOL Budget Request for FY2011: "Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis today, through a national online discussion with stakeholder groups, the general public and the news media, outlined the president's fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget request for the U.S. Department of Labor, which is built around the vision of "good jobs for everyone." ... Secretary Solis defines "good jobs" as those that: Can support a family by increasing incomes. Offer fair compensation. Narrow the wage gap. Allow for work-life flexibility. Promote safe and healthy workplaces. Give workers a voice. Foster fair working conditions in the global marketplace. Are sustainable and innovative, such as green jobs, providing opportunities to acquire the skills and knowledge for the jobs of the future. Help restore the middle class. ..."
- Kaiser Health News, Medicaid Beats Private Insurance When it Comes to Prevention: "Sen. Lamar Alexander – as well as other conservative lawmakers – characterized Medicaid as a "medical ghetto" during Senate floor speeches on the health overhaul debate last year, American Medical News reports. But, the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health contradicts that common perception. "Based on nearly 92,000 interviews, it found that in 36 states, children in Medicaid and CHIP were as likely or more likely than privately insured kids to have had at least one preventive health care visit over a 12-month period.""
- Wingham Rowan, Could Online Marketplaces Tackle Poverty?: "'National e-markets' would be safe, convenient, accessible Internet marketplaces with ultra-low overheads. The private sector alone cannot create these marketplaces, but they could quickly be realised using the same model that created the National Lottery. Recommendations include: Government should not fund, design, build or operate such marketplaces, but it could: provide a regulatory framework and access to validation procedures; divert public spending to local communities through the new markets, which could encourage the private sector to create regulated markets in return for a small cut of each transaction."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 11:43
- Crooked Timber, Civil Unions and Straight Marriage [Via Arthur Goldhammer]: "Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight) ... The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship."
- Stumbling and Mumbling, Going to the Dogs Under Brown: "Gordon Brown’s vision for the country is a desperately feeble one: 'A fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams whether that's owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business.' Is this a society for humans, or for dogs? Dogs can work hard and obey rules, and be thrown a few bones as a reward. There’s so much missing from this, not least: who makes the rules, and how? Isn’t a “fair society” one in which people get more power over their lives? What’s shocking here is the contrast between this and the ideals leftists had 150 years ago. Back then, John Stuart Mill deplored the “struggling to get on…the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels“ as a “disagreeable symptom” of a passing phase of society. Brown, by contrast, seems to glorify such grubby materialism. And Marx thought a rich society - and Britain today is surely richer than even Marx envisaged - would be able to offer its members self-actualization and freedom. Brown, however, can do no better than a mediocre human resources manager seeking to entrench capitalist alienation: turn up on time, do what bosses tell you, and you‘ll get a little pay rise. ... There’s something, though, that depresses me even more than the narrowness and lack of ambition of Brown’s words. It’s that they might actually appeal to voters."
- Frank Rich, What Could You Live Without?: "Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house. “We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”"
- Kevin Drum, The Vicious Cycle of Stagnant Wages: "Here's my capsule view of the great financial meltdown of 2008: For the past couple of decades, the benefits of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the rich. But the middle class still wanted to prosper, so the rich loaned them money to continually improve their lifestyles. That worked for a while. And then it didn't. This is a fairly idiosycratic view, and obviously not the whole story. And although plenty of economists have condemned growing income inequality and years of middle class wage stagnation, none of them (as far as I know1) have explicitly given it a share of the blame for the economic collapse of 2008. But via Mike Konczal, I finally have a credentialed ally. Take it away, Raghuram Rajan: 'In a new book he is working on, entitled “Fault Lines,” Rajan argues that the initial causes of the breakdown were stagnant wages and rising inequality. With the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living, there was an urgent demand for credit. The financial industry, with encouragement from the government, responded by supplying home-equity loans, subprime mortgages, and auto loans....The side effects of unrestrained credit growth turned out to be devastating-a possibility that most economists had failed to consider.'"
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 23:01
- E.J. Dionne, Symposium: Intellectuals and their America: "In a democracy, political engagement is an act of patriotism, a declaration of faith in the judgment of one’s fellow citizens and thus, ultimately, in one’s nation. Michael Walzer is right that the truly effective social critics are embedded in their societies and operate at least as much out of love as from alienation. And love is usually dominant. In The Company of Critics, Walzer quotes the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik: “A movement that does not honor society’s constant values is not sufficiently mature to undertake the reshaping of that society.” Walzer draws the right conclusion: “Criticism is most powerful . . . when it gives voice to the common complaints of the people or elucidates the values that underlie those complaints.” Note the twin obligations Walzer imposes on the critic: the democratic obligation to voice “common complaints” and the intellectual obligation to elucidate values. The latter can be quite subversive of accepted understandings, exposing as it typically does the ways in which a society ignores or violates the values it claims as its bedrock. Few leaders better embodied the patriotism inherent in embedded criticism than Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both drew on the insistence of the nation’s founding document that all men are created equal to launch social and political movements that revolutionized the country."
- The Guardian, A Pilot's Life: Exhausting Hours for Meagre Wages: "Anyone waiting for their underpants to be checked knows that the glamour went out of flying years ago. But nowhere has the cachet fallen so far as in the US, where pilots on commuter airlines responsible for more than half the country's flights now earn pitifully low salaries for long, unsocial hours. "
- Lee Drutman, What Came First: Conservatism or Status Quo?: "Miriam Matthews, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the Claremont Graduate University, Shana Levin, an associate profess of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Jim Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at Harvard University, have found evidence that both general feelings of threat and specific anxiety about other ethnic groups sometimes do lead individuals to embrace two tenets of political conservatism — support for the status quo and a belief that there is a natural social hierarchy to society. These tenets provide a salve for uncertainties and anxieties by offering a belief system in which there is a strong order to things."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 21:04
- NYTimes, Boulez's Gentler Roar: “I don’t apologize for being on the barricades,” [Boulez] said, recollecting his early days during the late 1940s and early ’50s, when he wrote a notoriously pitiless obituary of Schoenberg, conspicuously booed Stravinsky’s music in Paris in 1945 and declared that any musician who had not experienced, as he infamously put it, “the necessity of dodecaphonic music” was “useless” because he is “irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.” “Like a lion that had been flayed alive,” was Messiaen’s description of the young Mr. Boulez. “You never get results if you aren’t fighting,” Mr. Boulez now says. “I understand better other points of view, although I still may fight against them.” Mr. Barenboim phrased it another way when we talked one recent afternoon: “What makes Pierre a towering modernistic figure is that he has managed in his life to move between revolutionary moments and evolutionary moments. When revolution was necessary, he was there, courageously, to lead it.""
- NY Times, Multicultural Critical Theory. At B School?: ""A decade ago, Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had an epiphany. The leadership at his son’s elementary school had asked him to meet with its retiring principal to figure out how it could replicate her success. He discovered that the principal thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy — the same approach taken by the managing partner of a successful international law firm in town. “The ‘Eureka’ moment was when I could draw a data point between a hotshot, investment bank-oriented star lawyer and an elementary school principal,” Mr. Martin recalls. “I thought: ‘Holy smokes. In completely different situations, these people are thinking in very similar ways, and there may be something special about this pattern of thinking.’” That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.""
- MDRC, Testing Transitional Jobs and Pre-Employment Services in Philadelphia: "The evaluation uses a rigorous design in which nearly 2,000 long-term and potential long-term welfare (TANF) recipients were assigned at random to TWC [transitional jobs] or STEP [pre-employment services], or to a control group that did not participate in either program. The research team is following all three groups over time using surveys and administrative data. Results for the first 18 months show that: The TWC program group members had significantly higher employment rates and earnings than the control group members, but the difference faded after the first year of follow-up. When earnings from transitional jobs and unsubsidized jobs are combined, the TWC group earned about $1,000 (26 percent) more than the control group, on average, and received significantly less welfare assistance. The earnings gains and welfare reductions largely offset one another, however, leaving the two groups with about the same total income. Recipients who were assigned to the STEP program did not work or earn more, or receive less welfare, than the control group. The results may have been affected by the fact that many people who were assigned to STEP did not participate in the program for long periods."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 22:57
- James Galbraith, Who Are These Economists, Anyway?: "In the present crisis, the vapor trails of fraud and corruption are everywhere: from the terms of the original mortgages, to the appraisals of the houses on which they were based, to the ratings of the securities issued against those mortgages, to gross negligence of the regulators, to the notion that the risks could be laid off by credit default swaps, a substitute for insurance that lacked the critical ingredient of a traditional insurance policy, namely loss reserves. None of this was foreseen by mainstream economists, who generally find crime a topic beneath their dignity. In unraveling all this now, it is worth remembering that the resolution of the savings and loan scandal saw over a thousand industry insiders convicted and imprisoned. Plainly, the intersection of economics and criminology remains a vital field for research going forward."
- Miller-McCune, The Revolution Will be Mapped: "The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities. In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions."
- Dean Baker, Samuelson Wrong on Scarcity: "The most painful aspect of the economic crisis is that the pain is unnecessary. Ordinarily we think of the economy being limited by the supply of available resources, land, labor, and capital. We can't all have huge houses with servants. In a world where the economy is limited by supply, pain is understandable, even if not acceptable. To give one person more means taking something away from someone else. But, that is not the situation the U.S. or world economy faces today. We don't have 15 million unemployed because of scarcity. We have 15 million people unemployed because of a lack of demand. This is exactly the same problem that the country faced in the depression. All we had to do then to get people employed was to spend money, which we eventually did in very large amounts to fight World War II. That is what we need to do now to end the enormous pain caused by this downturn. Unfortunately, there is a lack of political will to undertake the necessary spending in part because of political hacks running around complaining about deficits. This is why it is especially painful to see Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson refer to the "scarcity" in which today's youth are being raised. In fact, they are being raised in a period of unprecedented abundance. It only looks like scarcity because the country's economic policy is so awful."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Wed, 12/30/2009 - 11:41
- Chris Bowers, There are Still Ongoing, Undecided and Winnable Public Option Fights in this Bill: "While the Medicare buy-in and new public health insurance option both likely dead for this bill, there are still provisions for public health insurance and public health care in the bill. ... In exchange for his vote on cloture, Senator Bernie Sanders secured funding in the Senate bill that will double the number of community health centers in America .... The CLASS provisions in the health care bill are a government-run program that will provide individuals long-term disability care. The program was championed by the late Ted Kennedy. The CBO estimates the program will have 10 million enrollees by 2019 (page 3). Always a champion of the people, Lieberman previously claimed that he would filibuster the bill if the CLASS program was not removed. While Lieberman, who is always true to his word, failed to follow through on his threat, the fight for this public program is not over. ....Even though the Medicare buy-in and a new public option program appear to be distant possibilities for this bill, champions of public health insurance and public health care in Congress should be demanding expansions of other public health programs in return for their votes."
- Mark Thoma, Policymakers Need Better and More Timely Economic Data: "When it was announced two months ago that GDP had grown by 3.5 percent in the third quarter of this year, it took the sails out of any movement toward another stimulus package. Now the number has been revised downward to 2.2 percent. ... This points to the fact that policymakers need better and more timely data. The fourth quarter is almost over yet we are still trying to figure out what happened in the third quarter, and we still don't know for sure."
- Chris Dillow, Inequality and Innovation: "Why did the industrial revolution occur so late in human history? ... this new paper suggests, though doesn’t explicitly articulate, another possibility - that inequality held back the economy. Roughly speaking, there are two sorts of technical progress. One is the introduction of new products. This is helped by inequality - because this implies that there’s a pool of wealthy customers for the new goods. But there’s another sort -process innovation, the introduction of new techniques that allow goods to be produced more cheaply for a mass market. And this form of innovation is retarded by inequality. After all, if the majority of people are on the breadline, or working in subsistence farming, producers have little incentive to finds ways of making new goods cheaper, because people still won’t be able to afford them. In this sense, process innovation - which is what the industrial revolution was - requires there to be a middle-income market, which in turn requires at least a little equality."
