As someone who is pretty much right at the US median income, it sure feels like things have stagnated economically. And the overall economic picture in Michigan doesn’t help, either.

Youtube has a lecture by Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren, “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class” http://youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

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PS – my father was a blue collar man at Whirlpool’s Benton Harbor plant for 35 years. Do keep buying those Whirlpool products, so his pension keeps going!

http://www.tampabay.com/news/article473596.ece

He also has a new book (enter Kevin Philips into your favorite retailer).

It is an object lesson in why the IQ of the electorate matters, and why we should be in favor of free markets, not capitalism.
a.s.

PS: I am amazed at how good your blog is: MIT really do get what academic freedom means.

More on the application of this post later perhaps, I have a meeting pending.

I hadn’t read Tyler Cowen before — I work in another part of the forest — and a visit to the link Glen provided tells me why he is regarded as a pundit — but his comments on this topic and Kevin Phillips in the pages I read seemed self-referential, circular and not archival. Cowen has other critics in the thread, I note.

Perhaps Harpers will publish an amendment to their careless author citation. Wikipedia’s extensive report on Kevin Phillips offers this for starters >

Kevin Phillips (political commentator)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kevin Phillips (born November 30, 1940) is an American writer and commentator, largely on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist, Phillips has become disaffected with his former party over the last two decades, and is now one of its harshest critics. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS’ NOW with Bill Moyers.

Phillips was a senior strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted a conservative realignment in national politics, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential recent works in political science. His predictions regarding shifting voting patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not extend “down ballot” to Congress until the Republican revolution of 1994. Philips also was partly responsible for the design of the Republican “Southern strategy” of the 1970s and 1980s.
The author of twelve books, he lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.