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Based on Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey data for 2013–14, this paper examines the association between work time (inclusive of both paid and unpaid work time) and the mental health outcomes of men and women in the United States, controlling for economic and social buffers, education, and demographic factors. In the United States, even though women constitute close to half of the paid labor force, they still perform the lion's share of unpaid work. The findings indicate that total work time is positively related with emotional distress for women, while there is no statistically significant relationship for men. For women, the relationship between work time and mental health is primarily driven by unpaid work rather than paid work. Evaluating the relationship between mental health and both productive and reproductive work is critical to develop effective public policies toward gender equity and social well-being. JEL classification : I14, J16, J01 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the turbulent behavior that might exist under a national average rate of profit. We use a database—ORBIS—that allows our investigation to start from the level of the firm, with data from 2007 to 2014. A comparison between the United States and China organizes the statistical description of the rates of profit in those countries. Three issues are investigated: the trajectories of the national average rate of profit and their disaggregation; the distribution of different rates of profit by firms, economic sectors, and manufacturing sectors, and the stability of those distributions over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on secular stagnation by estimating a measure of potential output growth for the post-war US economy derived from a novel model specification that allows for the cyclical interactions between income distribution, represented by the trajectory of the labor share of income, and economic activity, as measured by capacity utilization. The results obtained show that potential output growth exhibits a gradual decline that predates the Great Recession and follows the downward trajectory of the labor share of income, thus suggesting the existence of an important long-run relationship between income distribution and output growth in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Recession has provided an important intellectual challenge to both post-Keynesian and mainstream economists. In this article we survey some post-Keynesian views on household debt accumulation and the Great Recession of the United States, as well as the Atif Mian and Amir Sufi's studies, perhaps the most influential and empirically-oriented studies of mainstream economics. We identify and distinguish their policy perspectives, and highlight commonalities and differences between them. By examining both post-Keynesian and Mian and Sufi's views together, this paper emphasizes that, although there are clear differences between them, a careful examination reveals valuable complementarity which yields a better understanding of household debt accumulation and the Great Recession of the United States. JEL classification : E21, E32, E52, E62 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the gaping silence in mainstream economics regarding the relationship among capitalism, race, racism, and enduring racial inequality in the USA. Racial inequality is a glaring and enduring fact about the US economy. And yet mainstream economics has little to say about race or racism. Gregory Mankiw's bestselling textbook devotes seven pages to "discrimination." There is no discussion of racism per se. Mainstream economists and textbooks typically conflate racism and "discrimination," and reassure the reader that "markets contain a natural remedy for employer discrimination" (Mankiw, 2008: 409). A student is likely to leave ECON 101 (or an economics major) with a sense that "economic science" has "shown" that discrimination is not that big a deal, and that the history of racist plunder and exploitation in the USA (of which there likely has been no discussion) is not relevant to "economics." I argue here that the mainstream narrative (its assumptions, its logic, its conclusions, and its rhetorical choices and emphases) systematically obscures, dismisses, and ignores essential ways that racial inequality has been (re)produced by US capitalism. Especially striking is the resounding silence about the legacy of racist economic practices—in particular, the ways in which the enormous black/white wealth gap (and its effects) in the USA are linked to centuries of racist exclusion, violence, and plunder. The mainstream narrative thus whitewashes capitalism and exonerates "the market system." The final section argues for a radical multidisciplinary economics. JEL classification: J15, D63 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current economic expansion in the United States, which began in the summer of 2009, has lasted for more than nine years as of this writing, making it the second longest expansion since the end of World War II. The previous two expansions, of the 1990s and 2000s, were prolonged by big asset bubbles, which have played a key role in the neoliberal era in promoting long economic expansions. However, the current expansion has not seen an asset bubble large enough to significantly affect the macroeconomy. This paper examines the expansion since 2009 by analyzing the movements of the rate of profit, and its determinants, and the role of aggregate demand, with the aim of determining the factors that have kept crisis tendencies at bay so far. JEL Classification: E32, E30, E11, E02 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stagnation in the US economy since 2008 has given rise to a mainstream stagnation literature. This paper offers a critique of that literature and proposes an explanation for the current stagnation based on social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory. It presents historical and econometric evidence for an SSA-based explanation of the current stagnation and considers the implications for the likely near-future course of economic policy and institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Occupy movement that recently took place on Wall Street and in other parts of the globe, a lot of attention has recently been given to growing income inequality. The 2008 United States financial crisis, the Great Recession, and the subsequent weak recovery have brought about a more serious focus on income inequality and the widening income gap between the top 1 percent and other groups. These events have brought about some social unrest and instability in American society perhaps not seen since the Great Depression. How much has the top 1 percent of households gained in terms of income versus the other 99 percent in the United States over the last 30 years or so? Mainstream economists and other social scientists point to various causes which have been mentioned in many scholarly and popular writings. All of these mainstream factors affecting inequality have been found to be statistically significant in one scholarly study or another. This research paper explores other major concepts to explain income inequality rather than to dispute the findings of other existing research efforts. The empirical findings of this paper support radical arguments that income accumulation of those at the top is not connected to the productivity of capital investment, but rather instead is connected to the declining incomes and exploitation of the rest of the U.S. population despite the rising output per worker of the U.S. workforce over the last 30 to 40 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by chronicling the stunning inequality (economic and other) that characterizes the U.S. economy and U.S. cities. The development of cities in the United States in recent decades is linked quite essentially to the dynamics and contradictions of U.S. capitalism, including a policy agenda that has been pro-capital and anti-urban. The penultimate section of the paper shows that neoclassical theory – with its focus on “choice” – provides a deeply inadequate explanation of urban inequality. And yet neoclassicism, along with its cruder relative, neoliberalism, has continued to shape the narrative of U.S. cities. The final section argues for a “multidisciplinary economics” that recognizes that a rich urban economics requires insights from political science, sociology, geography, and other academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1960s, Minsky argued that implementing a decentralized job-guarantee policy funded by the federal government was a relevant way to promote full employment and price stability, and to alleviate poverty. This policy aims at providing a job to anybody willing to work and to pay a living wage. Over the past fifteen years, this idea has been subject to greater scrutiny and this paper contributes to that literature by estimating the gross cost of implementing a job-guarantee policy (JG). In order to calculate this cost, the paper uses the data available from the 1930s work programs. These work programs provide some interesting insights because enough data are available to determine the cost of JG under widely different rates of unemployment. The paper shows that JG would have been quite expensive during the early part of the 1930s when the unemployment rate was at 20 percent or more. Once unemployment receded to a usual level, the gross cost of JG would have been low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper locates social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory in relation to traditional Marxism. It then applies SSA theory to analyze the current trajectory of system transformation in the global system. Drawing lessons from the global crisis of the 1930s, it uses SSA theory to illuminate the causes and possible consequences of the system transformation that now appears to be developing—a transformation that may be replacing parliamentary democracies by right-wing nationalist repressive regimes in many countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Weisskopfian approach has dominated empirical studies of the US rate of profit for the last thirty-five years. Forty-five years earlier, Michal Kalecki developed a different frame suitable for empirical profit rate studies, which had the potential to give different, but complementary, insight into the profit rate analysis based on the Weisskopfian approach. This paper first presents a development of the Kaleckian frame. It then applies this frame to the US economy and presents some preliminary empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant number of left political economists hold that the U.S. Great Recession and subsequent lethargic performance are a crisis of over-capacity that resulted from over-investment. Kotz (2011, 2013) has recently attempted to provide empirical support for this position. Despite sharing an understanding of the crisis very similar to his, the authors find in this paper that a careful examination of his evidence does not support considering this to be a crisis of over-investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, commentators and politicians demonstrate a deep-rooted persistent adherence to a neoclassical model of the labor market, where a minimum wage increase is seen as an inevitable cause of unemployment, as it is assumed to occur at a point where the labor market was initially in equilibrium. The work of the Minimum Wage Study Commission (1981) uncovered the small size of the unemployment inflation effect, and the new minimum wage research also has corroborated this. Seen against these findings, the persistent rhetoric of sizeable “unemployment effects” of minimum wage increases simply shows the power of employers in a capitalist system. This paper suggests that counteracting the rhetoric is best done by recognizing the agency of the minimum wage worker and portraying this worker not as one who may “suffer unemployment” under a wage increase but who chooses to work fewer hours if hourly wages and benefits become sufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the outcomes of the financial crisis in low- and middle-income countries in the post-1980 era presents three broad findings: first, the burden of crises falls disproportionately on labor in general and low-income segments of the society in particular. Wages and the labor share of income fall, unemployment increases, the power of labor declines, and income inequality and poverty increase. Capital, on the other hand, recovers quickly and gains more ground. Second, government policies favor capital, especially financial capital, at the expense of the larger public. Crises also present opportunities for further deregulation and liberalization in financial markets and the rest of the economy. Third, following financial crises, foreign capital inflows may increase as international capital seeks to take advantage of the crisis and acquire assets at fire-sale prices. The 2008 U.S. financial crisis provides an opportunity to extend this analysis to a leading high-income country. By examining the experience of the United States after the financial crisis in terms of the questions and issues typically raised in examinations of low- and middle-income countries, this paper makes an original contribution, while, at the same time, contributing to the gradually emerging literature on the consequences of the U.S. financial crisis. We first look at the distributional effects of the financial crisis and compare this with the impacts of the crisis on capital. Then, we investigate the changes in income shares of labor and capital before shifting our attention to changes in inequality and poverty. Next, we focus on the role of government policies through an analysis of government taxation and spending policies. Finally, we examine the changes in capital inflows before concluding with a discussion of our overall findings and further research areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]