Disabled People Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine
The disabled community has responded to the adversities they face by organizing for legal rights that protect their autonomy and access to public life. But these rights are increasingly under attack.
1 min read
This year's Nobel Prize winner in economics has just been announced: Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist, for his work on unemployment and inflation. Phelps is one of the economists of the "natural rate of unemployment" theory -- the theory that has provided the intellectual foundation for employing fear-mongering about inflation to fight job-creation policies.
In the current issue of D&S, Dr. Dollar offers a primer on the history of the unemployment-inflation tradeoff and a political-economy critique of natural-rate-of-unemployment theory (and of its recent demise -- in the late 1990s, the U.S. unemployment rate went well below what economists claimed was its "natural" rate without causing the accelerating inflation that they'd repeatedly warned would result): http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0906drdollar.html
If you're looking for a (brief) progressive analysis of Phelp's technical arguments about inflation and real-wage expectations, check out Dean Baker's Oct. 9 "Beat the Press" column: http://www.prospect.org/deanbaker/