- On Capitol Hill
- On Wall Street
- In the Press
- Policy Reform Work
Our projects are designed to empower policy makers to create positive change. With a focus on collaboration and outreach, we provide original, standards-based research on key policy issues.
SCEPA joined with the Economic Policy Institute on Capitol Hill to brief congressional staff and policy experts on tax expenditures, or incentives given through the tax code without scrutiny by Congress.
SCEPA economists are working on the prospects for a more progressive economic order to emerge from the shock of the recession. They have published papers and documents that place current events in a longer-term context as well as policy proposals to deal with short-term concerns. They are also documenting the emerging discussion of how the discipline of economics is reacting to the Great Recession and the questioning of conventional economic analysis.
Lance Taylor, a SCEPA Faculty Fellow, presents an overview of his new book, Maynard’s Revenge, in a Google Tech Talk.
The book, published this November by Harvard University Press, is a timely analysis of mainstream macroeconomics, posing the need for a more useful and realistic economic analysis that can provide a better understanding of the ongoing global financial and economic crisis.
The government spends $143 billion through tax breaks in an effort to expand pension coverage and security. Yet, over half of the American workforce does not have a pension. Retirement insecurity hurts business plans, workers’ lives and retiree well-being. Reform is needed.
SCEPA’s Guaranteeing Retirement Income Project, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and in collaboration with Demos and the Economic Policy Institute, has a plan to guarantee safe and secure retirement income for all Americans.
The Fake Hope of Financial Literacy in Solving the Debt Problem
On May 16, 2013, SCEPA Director Teresa Ghilarducci joined a panel discussion hosted by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Robert Kuttner's new book, Debtor’s Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. Below are her comments on the structural shift of risk:
"The last 20 years has seen significant growth and change in the character of interactions between working and middle-class households and financial institutions and markets.1
With this financial development and households' increased exposure to financial risk, academic economists and others have embarked on a new inquiry, a body of study some call the "culture of finance." This is the name of an NYU seminar taught this summer featuring business faculty, anthropologists, and investment bank economists. Other scholars call this line of inquiry the "financialization of households," and even others embed it in literature as the "culture or varieties of capitalism" (see among others David Soskice and Peter Hall).2
Generally, the project seeks to understand how and why individuals and households are taking on more and more economic risk. These risks were once managed by government and employers, and sometimes social insurance arrangements or employee benefits, such as pension plans, unemployment insurance, and default risk by banks. These institutions have been replaced by financial institutions and products, and are key to the story of how corporations and banks have shifted the risk of financial loss to households.
Read more: The Fake Hope of Financial Literacy in Solving the Debt Problem
U.S. Retirement System Receives Poor Grades
Every country is worried about investing retirement funds correctly, and every country wants to minimize risks to the taxpayer so there aren’t large, unknown bills in the future. In the United States, we use our tax code far more than other countries to encourage savings and other socially beneficial behavior. We spend billions of dollars to incentivize saving for retirement through 401(k)’s and I.R.A.’s. That costs us a huge amount of money without much effect in creating a secure retirement system. In fact, America’s voluntary system means that nearly six out of 10 workers are not in pension or 401(k) plans.
Barney Frank Discusses the Federal Budget and Military Spending
On Tuesday, June 4, 2013, former Congressman Barney Frank will speak at The New School about why military spending can and must be reduced if we are to bring down the federal deficit in a socially responsible way. He will be joined by Professor Robert Pollan, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
6:00p.m. - 7:30p.m.
John Tishman Auditorium
66 W. 12th Street
New York, NY
RSVP to
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.
Barney Frank retired from over 30 years in Congress (1981-2013) where he served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011. As chairman, Frank was instrumental in crafting a compromise bill to stem the tide of home mortgage foreclosures, as well as the subsequent $550 billion rescue plan. He was a co-author of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and led the passage of the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act. In 1987, Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as openly gay, and in 2012 he married his longtime partner, Jim Ready, becoming the nation’s first congressman to enter into a same-sex marriage while in office.
Robert Pollin is professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (PhD, New School for Social Research, 1982). Professor Pollan was the author of the recent paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" (with Thomas Hernon and Michael Ash) that stirred controvery regarding the flawed methodology and coding errors behind the influential austerity paper.
