The story of robotics replacing workers in manufacturing is nothing new but now it seems that robots are moving into the once unthinkable sector of service jobs. The kind of work some previously thought only humans could do. If you meet Baxter, the latest humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics – you should get comfortable with [...]

Last Friday President Obama signed the sequester order officially launching America’s latest austerity program. Austerity has yet to produce jobs or growth in any country it has been tried in. In fact, austerity is becoming one of the few certainties within economic policy making – the certainty of losing growth if the policy is adopted. [...]

The fleecing class had quite a year. Despite providing little to no valuable goods or services Wall Street has once again siphoned off a huge share of America’s wealth for itself. While Americans foolishly dreamed of a time gone by where opportunity existed for the non-rich as well as the rich, Wall Street broke into [...]

There are so many moving parts to the expiring measures due at the end of the year that it’s often hard to assess them all. Republicans like to frame them solely as about taxes, which is untrue – the sequester and the change to Medicare reimbursement rates and the extended unemployment benefits make up a [...]

New York is slowly recovering from the damaging floodwaters and winds of Superstorm Sandy. And what we’re seeing in the aftermath is how the burden natural disasters invariably falls on the shoulders of those least equipped to cope. Nowithstanding the human interest stories about trying to find an outlet to charge cell phones, the real [...]

As we wake up to the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, it appears clear that the most lasting damage is to the New York City transit system. The MTA describes it as the biggest disaster in the 108-year history of the system. Seven subway tunnels are flooded, and system power has been either turned off or [...]

Poor people don’t vote. At least, they don’t vote in proportion with their share of the population. And they certainly don’t “vote” in the sense that politicians would notice, by attending thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners and contributing to their campaigns.

Trying to deflect from Mitt Romney’s comments on those dastardly parasites who make up 47% of America, conservatives have trotted out an “exclusive” secret tape from 1998 with then State Senator Barack Obama making utterly banal mainstream Democratic comments about redistribution: And my suggestion, I guess, would be that the trick—and this is one of [...]

The Economic Policy Institute delivers an annual analysis of the “State of Working America,” and this year’s version was released today. In their key findings, they lament the rise of “policy-driven inequality,” a condition that, even when the job market improves, leads to the bulk of our economic growth funneling up to the 1%, while [...]

Just because I don’t want to ignore the two main speeches from last night’s convention, as I feel I did in my initial thoughts on the convention, let me wind back to them. I found them to be mostly similar, and actually, mostly limiting. First Julián Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, spoke of an [...]

I had the opportunity to see Tim Noah speak last night about his new book The Great Divergence. It’s a book-length version of his Slate series on the rise of income inequality since 1979, and I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot different in the book, other than it’s in print rather than on [...]