Winter 2024

Unemployment is now the most critical issue of the current recession, whose depth and duration remain unpredictable despite the federal stimulus program. New sources of economic growth sufficiently vigorous and labor-intensive to absorb the growing pool of redundant workers, domestically …

Last January, the New York Times reported that assembly line workers at Detroit automobile factories, who have been earning around $28 per hour, would be “bought out” and gradually replaced by workers earning as little as half of that. This …

In 2004 the International Labor Office (ILO) published a voluminous though mistitled report called “Economic Security for a Better World.” This is in fact a treatise about the economic insecurity that has been afflicting the world’s working people for the …

Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalization, and the Fight Against Poverty

In his article “Markets and Social Pain” (Dissent, Winter 1998), James B. Rule argues that market ideology “poses a historic challenge to the kind of thinking we do in Dissent.” He observes that no question is currently more important for …

Despite the highest unemployment rate since 1933, the German central bank has declined to reduce interest rates. To do so, its spokesman asserted, would in no wise affect unemployment. Unemployment is “structural” in origin, it has nothing to do with …

The welfare state is about security. It is about employment security, income security, and communal stability. It is premised on macro-economic policies designed to mitigate the business cycle and its employment and income effects and to ensure that advancing technologies …

This is a well-written, well-argued book. It is a critical assessment of the private pension system and an account of its transformation into a major element of capital accumulation and corporate finance strategy. The author devotes a large part of …

The harsh conditions imposed by both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank upon developing countries belie the concern with poverty expressed in the quotations above. The principle of “conditionality” under which the IMF makes loans available is …

The disintegration of the Soviet Union stemmed largely from the long decline of its economy. This decline undermined the role of the Communist party, which had been the central force in the country’s political and economic structures. The legitimacy of …

The economic reform urged upon the Soviet Union by the great international financial institutions reduce to three elements— macroeconomic stabilization, freeing of all but a few prices, and ownership reform. These are discussed in The Economy of the USSR, a …