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Ending growth is unthinkable to most economists. But saving the planet may require it, at least for rich countries, this economist believes. Making it tolerable would require a high minimum standard of living. In this provocative piece, she tells us which policies would be needed.

The author argues that inequality, combined with only modest growth, can have grave moral consequences. History suggests that, in the past, a rising standard of living has promoted tolerance for others, commitment to economic opportunity, and democracy. But stagnating incomes due to inequality can lead to the opposite outcomes. The nation's response to immigration is a good example, says the author.

Typically, the standard of living is measured by incomes and wealth. But this political scientist believes a core benefit of a middle class is economic security. He says that what is truly harming ...

Challenge has published many pieces arguing that the standard of living in the United States has suffered in recent decades. But not everyone agrees there is a serious middle-class squeeze. Here is a counterargument.

How well is the United States really doing? Money isn't everything, says this economist. He takes a broader look at the standard of living in the United States compared to other rich nations and finds the United States lags in several key ways, including the fact that Europeans are now taller on average than Americans. Greater tolerance of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth in the United States than in Europe may have taken its toll.

The International Monetary Fund has imposed its traditional policies in Iraq. Few have considered the consequences. But the author notes that business as usual will probably not work in Iraq, and may well be destructive. He also wonders why there is so little imagination at the IMF.

ECONOMISTS, cliche that the United States is in the midst of transitioning from an industrial economy to one that is knowledge-based. The general argument is that for the United States to compete and maintain high standards of living in a global economy, it needs a welleducated, motivated, and innovative workforce that is employed in organizations that treat workers' knowledge and skills as assets and sources of competitive advantage rather than just as costs to be controlled. Comparing families that got ahead to those that did not in recent years demonstrates that this transition is more than a cliche. What is

Assets in the United States are distributed even more unequally than income, though they can be vital to an individual's standard of living. The authors present a comprehensive assessment of the distribution of assets in the United States and calculate an asset poverty line below which an individual cannot meet his or her basic needs.

to official figures, around 12 percent of the working population of the European Union (EU) is unemployed. Eighteen million European citizens, 5 million of them under the age of twenty-five, are officially looking for work. Relevant research institutes around Europe inform us that the number of unemployed is continuing to rise. It is estimated that, over the next two years, at least another half million people will join the ranks of the unemployed. The precipitous rise in unemployment in Europe has caused huge social problems in recent years. The rupture of social cohesion, the marginalization of a large part of the labor force, and the fall in living standards for a significant number of European citizens have shaken the faith of Europeans in the European ideal, of "Social Europe/' such that in some countries the supporters of Economic and Monetary Union now constitute a minority.

Americans believe that if one works hard, one should not be poor. Yet the working poor constitute one of the fastest-growing segments of the impoverished population, and their growth is expected to continue. According to the official government definition of poverty, which compares family income to a minimum standard of living, the working poor number nine million. This number doubles, however, when measures of poverty are used that more closely reflect what most Americans think is necessary to live on. Debate about the cause of poverty is also substantial. Some, like Bradley Schiller (1994) and Charles Murray (1997), argue that the working poor are poor because they work too few hours: If they worked full-time and year-round, which means at least 35 hours a week and 50 weeks a year, they would not be poor. The poor are poor, according to this view, because they simply do not work hard enough. Others, however, argue that poverty among the working poor

Two hundred years of our nation's history reveals the quintessential American hope and expectation that each generation will be better off economically than its parents. The decade of the 1980s was a most troubling one for our country because it dashed that hope for the first time. Not only has the dream of self-betterment been put on hold for most members of the current generation, but it also has been systematically undermined for the next as well. More and more of our nation's wealth has been dissipated, as we have borrowed against tomorrow to pay for current spending. Less and less ofthat spending has gone into government programs that benefit average families or into the investments we need both private and public to improve our standard of living and to secure our children's future. At the outset of the 1980s, our government undertook a reckless experiment in what was called "supplyside economics. ' ' It should have been labeled * 'Borrow and Squander." In the past decade, federal borrowing averaged 4.2 percent of the gross national product, by far the highest sustained level outside of wartime in our nation's history. As a result, we have saddled ourselves and our children with an additional $2 trillion in debt, a large share of which is owed to foreign investors. The radical buildup of government debt in the Reagan-Bush era is a sharp break from the past (Figure 1). Although budgets have rarely been completely balanced, every post-World War II administration until President Reagan's succeeded in reducing the national debt as a share of the gross national product. (By the end of the 1970s, the debt had dropped to only a quarter of GNP.) But we now face a national debt that exceeds half the GNP a level unseen since the mid-1950s, when we were still paying off the cost of World War II. In fact, counting the growing portion of the debt that is owed to the Social Security trust funds, the debt now approaches a staggering two-thirds of the GNP.

This article argues for a different measure of recession or depression the real income of the average worker or family. Why real income? It is because real income determines material living standards, and our standard of life is the best measure of economic progress. A recession or a depression interrupts progress, so if real income stops growing, it is reasonable to regard the economy as being in a depressed state. Furthermore, this approach leads us directly to the productivity question. In the final analysis, productivity is the ultimate determinant of the economic well-being of individuals, families, and the nation. Implicit in the foregoing argument is the idea that employment as such no longer suffices as a basic measure of the economy's state of health. Ever since John Maynard Keynes's classic work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Income, appeared in 1936, the level of employment or its counterpart, unemployment has been the standard macroeconomic benchmark for measuring prosperity or recession. There were good reasons for this, because over most of the postWorld War II period there was a strong correlation between jobs and the prosperity of the individual or family. This linkage no longer holds to the extent it once did. If measures of real income for the worker and the

The wave of strikes that took place in Poland in 1980 started as a protest against increases in food prices without corresponding adjustments in wages. The real cause was, however, much deeper. It was an expression of nonconfidence in the party and government leaders and their policies, and a protest against the system of planning and management which had not been able to secure improvements in the standard of living. The strikes were a sign that the workers, and the entire population, realized that Gierek and his group had no program and were not prepared to take the necessary risks to introduce bold systemic changes. There was general recognition that the economic situation would not improve without strong pressure from below without creating an emer

The consequences of a zero economic growth (ZEG) policy are examined to see what limits to growth, some of which already exist, are desirable and what changes in our institutions are required to impose a no-growth policy. Past periods of zero or negative growth have increased unemployment, raised employability standards, and increased income-distribution inequalities with a subsequent lowering of the living standard. Zero population growth would offset this somewhat by freeing the capital now spent on education and career training and using it to raise per capita living standards if a work-sharing and unemployment-payment system were devised. Undesirable social implications would be felt both if a lack of employment opportunities reduced competition and consumption habits or if it led to intensive competition. Advocates of ZEG propose to restrain only those areas using nonrenewable resources and causing pollution of the environment, while expanding the service areas. The service sector (e.g., transportation and utilities) is also polluting and uses nonrenewable resources, however, pointing up their failure to account for indirect consumption. Many undeveloped countries already have ZEG but would not be content for the U.S. to halt growth opportunities. ZEG would be difficult to enforce and would do nothing to promote pollutionmore » control. (DCK)« less