Lawrence King is interviewed about how the International Monetary Fund is directly or indirectly intervening in the agriculture policies or more than 100 countries around the world. This is despite the fact that the IMF has a mandate that prohibits it from such interventions. (The Real News Network, 10/7/18)
Day: October 10, 2018
Arindrajit Dube says Amazon’s recent announcement that it will boost its minimum wage to $15 per hour is good news for workers at the lower end of the wage scale. “For much of the past three decades, the wages of those at the bottom of the wage distribution have failed to keep up with overall economic gains. Most of the wage increase has occurred among the top half of the wage distribution, especially since the 1990s,” Dube says. (Yahoo! Finance, 10/4/18)
A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Michael Ash and James K. Boyce, finds that for racial minorities, living near facilities such as gas or oil refineries or coal processing plants did not significantly bolster minority employment. Instead, they found that minorities living near such plants are more likely to be exposed to pollutants but could not count on them to provide jobs. Ash and Boyce took information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and did a comparison as part of the study. (Phys.org, 10/3/18)
An op-ed discussing the earned income tax credit and how it is a low-visibility tax policy that actually works quite well to mitigate the effects of poverty mentions that Arindrajit Dube, economics, has suggested an adjustment to the program. Dube says combining the EITC with a basic guaranteed income for poor people could be a way to boost its positive influence. (Bloomberg, 10/1/18)