Media

Last night, I had the honor of attending an Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition that, “Income Inequality Impairs the American Dream of Upward Mobility.” It was an engrossing debate.

“Silly.”

That’s how Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg described the concerns of Walmart workers and their allies who protested the mega-retailers low wages and poor employment policies in New York City last Thursday. “Wal-Mart doesn’t have any locations in New York City,” explained Lundberg, trying to reach those of us still too silly to grasp the fact.

This past Friday, in a speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, spoke out on the evils of economic inequality in the United States. She noted that the steady growth in inequality over the past several decades represents the most sustained rise since the 19th century.

The Supreme Court said Saturday that, for the first time, it is allowing a voting law to be used for an election even though a federal judge, after conducting a trial, found the law is racially discriminatory in both its intent and its impact, and is an unconstitutional poll tax. It is not only not a good look for the court, it is an abdication of the federal responsibility to protect every American voter from racially discriminatory voter suppression.

For a moment last week, it looked like Walmart CEOs were getting enlightened. The company promised to “end minimum-wage pay” for its lowest-paid sales workers and touted a plan to ‘”invest in its associate base” and maybe even offer more bonus opportunities.

Last week, AT&T agreed to pay $80 million to customers who had been overbilled for charges they had not authorized. This was an all-too-rare case of a perpetrator brought to book: In recent decades, Americans have increasingly been hit with fees they know nothing about, which have contributed to a crisis of consumer debt. We must hope we are entering a new era of regulatory activism that will shine a light on hidden fees.

Today, Vice President Biden and others from the Obama administration, are meeting with human-resource executives from companies that are part of the president’s effort to address the problem of long-term unemployment, including Citigroup Inc., CVS Caremark Corp. and Boeing

The New York Times editorial was unequivocal: “the [New York City] Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio should unite behind this worthwhile bill” to ban the discriminatory practice of employment credit checks. After all, as the Times pointed out, “The worst of the recession is behind us, but the damage lives on for millions of Americans who are hobbled by bad credit… Does membership in the club of beleaguered borrowers inevitably make someone a risky hire or an unreliable employee? Hardly.

Today’s Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Professor Jean Tirole for his work in industrial organization, and how to best regulate such industries that are dominated by powerful firms, like finance and technology. It’s an important recognition of this work, because the economics profession has long relegated industrial organization, and the study of oligiopolistic markets, to a theory that, sure, it exists in practice— but who cares about practice?