Articles
Is Workers’ Compensation Keeping Pace?
Use the proper benchmark to explore questions of what’s fair.
November 10, 2026
Published: December 6, 2017
Is it true that the wages for those in the middle class have been stagnant since the 1970s? It turns out that economic life is difficult to measure accurately. Depending on what you decide to measure, the numbers can support different interpretations.
Watch Episode 2 in this series, The Paradox of Household Income.
Discussion Questions
- What group should we measure in order to discover how the middle class is doing in America?
- Does it make sense to exclude the elderly when trying to measure the progress of the middle class over time?
- Why does it matter if the composition of the middle class is changing when trying to assess the performance of the economy?
Referenced In The Video
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Limiting Federal Spending Growth to Balance the Budget
Many think that balancing the federal budget would require deep cuts in entitlement programs. This paper shows to the contrary that the budget can be balanced within 15 years through modest and sustained federal spending restraint and moderately higher economic growth. Key to this restraint is to limit the growth in the average future value of entitlement benefits per recipient to today’s level, after adjusting for inflation and rising healthcare costs.
November 10, 2026
Articles
Brazil Finances
Many correspondents have sent me views of Brazil’s fiscal situation. Some quotes follow. (Anonymous. On the one hand, credit where it is due. On the other hand, these are personal emails which I didn’t check for permission to forward, and I don’t want to out people for corresponding with me! I also didn’t check any numbers.)
November 7, 2026