At 10:00 AM 8/20/2002 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: >In a Fortune column in 1999, PK said that Sweden in 1980 would have been >his social ideal. That's more than your usual vaguely liberal technocrat >usually says. Where are his politics exactly? > >Doug
You've gotta read his 1996 article for Slate, "The CPI and the Rat Race," too: http://slate.msn.com/?id=1915 He moves from the CPI overstatement affair to a discussion of how it's possible that real income in the 1950s could be so much lower than it is now, and yet we tend to view the 50s as a period of affluence. His explanation? Greater inequality today. He, somewhat torturously, reinvents the old relative deprivation wheel, and - after admitting that this condemns most Americans to relative poverty given the country's extreme inequality - ends thusly: "If one follows this line of thought one might well be led to some extremely radical ideas about economic policy, ideas that are completely at odds with all current orthodoxies. But I won't try to come to grips with such ideas in this column. Frankly, I don't have the time. I have to get back to my research - otherwise, somebody else might get that Nobel." -----Ben
