Quotes from Robert Kuttner

Today, large numbers of citizens throughout the West are angry that the good life is being stolen from them. They are not quite sure whom to be angry at—immigrants, corporations, the government, politically correct liberals, the rich, the poor?

I like Sanders a lot...but I think his time may have passed.

It speaks volumes about where the real power in America lies that Democrats found it easier to move to the left on an array of identity issues than to move left on pocketbook issues and challenge the dominance of finance.

The threat to democracy is increasingly within the West.

of the USA. When the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, one of the pioneering prepaid group health plans, was organized in the late 1930s, its founders included activists in trade unions and producer co-ops. Because health co-ops were fiercely opposed by organized medicine, their leaders and members necessarily had to become active in progressive politics.

the asymmetry between a ferociously strategic, corporate Republican Party and a compromised Democratic Party is telling.

But the presidential Democratic Party, whipsawed between a liberal/labor wing and a Wall Street/New Democrat wing, has not been willing to make it a priority to help working people exercise their rights under the Wagner Act. Even when Democrats had a working majority in Congress, as they did for four years under President Carter, two under Clinton, and two under Obama, the White House refused to spend serious political capital on labor reform.

The ideological gap between the parties has indeed widened, and party discipline has increased. But the source of the widening gap is that Democrats have moved moderately to the center, while Republicans have moved to the far right. And the main source of deadlock is that Republicans have decided to refuse to compromise with Democrats, the better to destroy both Democrats and effective government.

In the disconnect between grievance and remedy, there is an astonishing muddle. Angry people vote for a seeming populist, and they get an autocrat whose policies and appointees make the economy even more tilted to the very rich. Trump's populism turns out to be a blend of spite, entertainment, jingoism—and alliance with corporations when it comes to actual policy. Yet in the absence of government policies to lean against the predations of the market, Trumpism fills the vacuum.

This chapter begins an inquest. The basic finding: the postwar bargain was built more on a convergence of circumstances than on durable, permanent changes. The bargain proved surprisingly fragile, once capitalists regained their normal, temporarily suppressed powers in a still-capitalist economy. This shift occurred both in national politics and in the new globalization.

polity with extremes of wealth and poverty is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt. — ARISTOTLE

In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.

In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage.

Despite its scientific pretensions, economics still remains more of an art than a science