Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.

Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.

The economic expansion that began in 2001, while it has been great for corporate profits, has yet to produce any significant gains for ordinary working Americans. And now it looks as if it never will.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.