Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (and Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)
by Jared Bernstein
Summary
Is Social Security really going bust, and what does that mean to me? If I hire an immigrant, am I hurting a native-born worker? Why does the stock market go up when employment declines? Should I give that homeless guy a buck? What’s a “living wage”? How much can presidents really affect economic outcomes? What does the Federal Reserve Bank really do? And even when some pundits say the economy’s sound, why do I still feel so squeezed?
If you’d like some straight answers, premier economist Jared Bernstein is here to help. In Crunch he responds to dozens of questions he has fielded from working Americans, questions that directly relate to the bottom-line, dollars-and-cents concerns of real people. Chances are if there’s a stumper you’ve always wanted to ask an economist, it’s solved in this book.
Excerpt
My name is Jared and I am a practicing economist.
I made my first graph decades ago, and while it sure felt good to seethe way the bars lined up, I figured I could control the impulse. After awhile, I was making several graphs and tables per hour, and talking earnestly about inflation, supply and demand curves, and Federal Reserve policy. I still thought I could stop whenever I wanted to.
It hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, it’s gotten much worse. I now goon TV shows and have raging arguments about tax cuts, trade balances,the minimum wage, and unemployment. Maybe you’ve seen me while flipping through the channels. Maybe you’ve wondered, whatever’s got this guy so wound up?
I’ll tell you. Economics has been hijacked by the rich and powerful, and it has been forged into a tool that is being used against the rest of us. Far too often, economists justify things many of us know to be wrong while claiming the things we believe are critically important can’t be done.I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen smart people with good hearts crumble in the face of economic arguments. Many of us will defer to such arguments, no matter how nuts these arguments seem, because they come shrouded in the mysterious authority of science. You might want to argue that unemployed people need a safety net when they lose their job, for example, but you’re prone to back off the minute some economist points out how that will lead to “European levels of unemployment” or how it will “kill the person’s incentive to find a job.”
Maybe you’ve wondered whether all the tax cuts targeted at wealthy investors are really so necessary, especially given that we’re spending borrowed money, only to be reminded that these tax cuts will spur investment and growth. Don’t you get it? the story goes: We can’t afford not to cut taxes!
At most, you might muster the gumption to say, “Well, I’m not an economist, but that doesn’t sound right to me.”
Well, I am an economist, and if I may ironically borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, I’m here to help.1 It doesn’t sound right to me either, and that’s because it’s wrong.
I’m tired of being stuck in the studio engaging in rants with Darth Vaders with PhDs. Wouldn’t it be more useful to have an open-ended, rant-free dialogue with real, everyday people about their economic questions?
Maybe you’ve been wondering, is Social Security really going bust, and what does that mean to me? If I hire an immigrant, am I hurting a nativeborn
worker? How much can presidents affect economic outcomes? What does GDP measure and what does it leave out? How come child care workers make so little? What does the “Fed” do, anyway? What’s the cost of ignoring global warming? What’s a “living wage”? And what is up with all those high-end tax cuts?
And of course, one that looms particularly large in the pages that follow: Why do I feel so squeezed?
In the following pages, I answer these and other questions.
Copyright © 2008 by Jared Bernstein. Reprinted by permission of Berrett-Kohler Publishers Inc.
Reviews
“[A] must-read…Bernstein explains how we got to where we are, what to do to fix it, and why fighting for a fair society is so important"—Senator John Edwards
"The sprightliest writer working in the dismal science since the heyday of John Kenneth Galbraith"—Harold Meyerson, Washington Post columnist
"[A] a dangerous book….witty, irreverent, and easy to read, but don’t let that fool you. It’s powerful"—Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School and coauthor of All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan
Author's Biography
Jared Bernstein is senior economist and director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. He is the author of All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy and is the coauthor of eight editions of The State of Working America. His work has been published in The American Prospect, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the New York Daily News. As well as being a featured weekly commentator on a variety of CNBC programs such as Kudlow & Company and The Call, he makes regular appearances on various NPR programs, including Morning Edition and Marketplace.