The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt
Institute’s top 5 stories of the week.
1. Fed Up: The Death of
the Phillips Curve
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell
testified before the Financial Services Committee on
Wednesday and was met with sharp
questions from
committee members, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). Roosevelt Fellows JW Mason and Mike Konczal
elevated a 2017
report on the
issues for the committee before the hearing. New
York magazine’s Eric Levitz explains
why Wednesday was a huge moment for monetary policy, and Neil Irwin
covers
the Fed’s rejection of its own consensus on full
employment. For the NYT, Mason describes
what
full employment would really look like, and he outlines what happened at the
hearing here.
2. Addressing the Roots of the
Racial Wealth Gap
In partnership with the Haas
Institute, Roosevelt Fellows Andrea Flynn and Rakeen Mabud published
an evaluation of the Ford
Foundation’s
grantmaking on the racial wealth gap over the last 20 years. While
acknowledging advancements in the philanthropic sector’s understanding
of race-based wealth inequities, Flynn and Mabud conclude that
disproportionate attention to individual savings behavior failed to
dismantle systemic racial exclusion. As Roosevelt
Fellow and Insight
Center President Anne Price tweeted
this week, “Somewhere along the way, asset building became
increasingly conflated with ending the racial wealth gap. If we want
to truly address racial wealth inequality, we have to focus
exclusively on its root causes.”
3. Going Beyond Equal
Pay
On the heels of the fourth World
Cup victory for the US women’s national team, Roosevelt Fellow Rakeen
Mabud highlights the team’s fight—and the broader movement—for pay
equality in a Forbes op-ed. Though the record-breaking women’s
team earns more revenue—and scores more victories—than their male
counterparts, their max earning potential for a World Cup cycle is
only $0.23 on the dollar compared to the men’s team.
“If the success and advocacy of the USWNT shows us anything, it is
that those who have historically faced an economy stacked against them
are no longer willing to put up with it,” Mabud writes.
4. The Plight of Health Care in Rural
America
The market
power crisis is
hurting workers, consumers, and entire communities. In
“The
Plight of Health Care in Rural America: How Hospital Mergers and
Closures Harm Women,” Roosevelt's Andrea Flynn and Rakeen Mabud explore how
corporate consolidation disadvantages rural women as patients and as
workers. “Trends in the hospital industry mirror
broader trends of outsized corporate and employer power in our
society,” said
Mabud. “What we are seeing
within the health care sector underscores the cost that these shifting
power dynamics have for the public, especially rural
Americans.”
5.
The Next Payday Loans
On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) shared
a recent American Prospect op-ed
coauthored by Roosevelt Fellow Julie Margetta Morgan. “Wall Street is lobbying policymakers to
weaken the rules for their new ways to trick [and] trap people into
debt. This time it's student debt—but we’ve seen this story before,”
said Warren. Margetta explains why the promise of income
share agreements
(ISAs) will likely fall short and elevates real solutions: “If
legislators really want to help students, they should focus on the
basics: fighting for increased investments in public higher education,
rebalancing power between employers and workers in the labor market,
and alleviating the burden of student debt.”
What We’re
Reading
This week, Roosevelt Senior
Economist Lenore Palladino and Fellow Brishen Rogers released two new
working papers on corporate governance and automation, respectively.
Palladino explores “stakeholder corporations,” in which other
stakeholders beyond shareholders (most notably, workers) collectively
engage in corporate decision-making and own corporate equity. Rogers
makes
the case that
automation is not a major threat to workers today but that existing
labor law allows companies to use new technology—specifically
information technology—in ways that give them outsized power over
their workers.
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