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George Tyler

George Tyler is a former US deputy Treasury assistant secretary and senior official at the World Bank. He is the author of What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class … And What Other Nations Got Right.

George Tyler

Getting to zero—what’s the beef?

George Tyler 3rd December 2021

Most livestock land will have to be repurposed as carbon sinks to remove the huge global emissions related to food production.

Not seeing the wood for the trees—the EU’s environmental blunder

George Tyler 7th September 2021

Supporting a conversion to wood burning has unwittingly incentivised power plants to increase greenhouse gases.

US economy mired in viral stagnation loop

George Tyler 31st August 2020

The travails of the US economy come amid a politics never so poisonous since the civil war.

A European Union climate agenda for COP26

George Tyler 27th February 2020

The EU should bring a new climate agenda to Glasgow—including a roadmap for emerging nations to embrace a future beyond fossil fuels.

Unpacking supreme courts to restore checks and balances

George Tyler 7th November 2019

Democracy is threatened by politicisation of constitutional courts. Unorthodox tactics are required to restore their role.

The superiority of codetermination

George Tyler 16th July 2019

The United States should learn from the better performance of European companies which have worker representation on boards.

What European Democracies Can Teach America

George Tyler 22nd June 2018

Amid authoritarian and illiberal forces buffeting social democracies, it is helpful to renew appreciation for their political architectures, especially the central role developed over a century and a half for the principle of proportional representation (PR). Its absence is one factor responsible for the poor quality of American democracy documented in Billionaire Democracy. In contrast […]

Fake News And The Fairness Doctrine

George Tyler 23rd May 2018

Fake news in America’s public square is a failure of its information marketplace. Remediation should occur through enhanced marketplace competition, not government censorship. I have argued that the quality of democracy is lower in America than in much of Europe. It lacks co-determination, for instance, which is why US wages stagnate even as inflation-adjusted wages […]

Codetermination Enters The American Political Debate

George Tyler 20th April 2018

Three senators have introduced unprecedented legislation mandating that employee representatives must comprise one-third of Boards of Directors at publicly-listed US corporations. Upgraded corporate governance with codetermination is an unfamiliar concept to most Americans. Its appearance acknowledges the weakness of conventional tools to end wage stagnation. And it reflects frustration by Democratic senators Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth […]

Social Media Platforms Should Tell The Truth

George Tyler 26th March 2018

The high quality democracies of northern Europe are an unnatural construct, history teaching us that the universal default setting of human society is authoritarianism. There are many key elements in crafting and sustaining such high quality democracies, including engendering a common body of trusted information, a communitarian spirit, the rule of law and the like. […]

American Democracy Sold To The Highest Bidder

George Tyler 30th January 2018

Aristotle measured the quality of democracy by the extent to which politics constrains the economically powerful, allowing the preferences of the landless to be reflected in public policy. According to a new analysis, American democracy gets a failing grade on Aristotle’s test while the countries of northern Europe are star pupils. Path-breaking recent research has […]

Trump: Reaganomics Redux

George Tyler 22nd November 2016

It’s wages, stupid! Analysts are pondering why millions of the same voters who favored President Obama in 2008 and (less enthusiastically) in 2012 pivoted to favor his antithesis, Donald Trump, in 2016. Economic frustration centered on stagnant wages is mostly the answer, reflected in a generalized desire for “change” expressed by 39 percent of voters […]

Why US Democrats Must Derail Republican Party Nationalist Populism With Economic Populism

George Tyler 15th February 2016

The Republican presidential aspirant nominated at this summer’s convention is likely to become that party’s nominee in part by invoking jingoist and xenophobic themes drawn from the playbooks of eastern European authoritarians. Miloš Zeman, the Czech President asserts, for example, “I do not want Islam in the Czech Republic.” And Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has […]

Labor Day: Good Time To Readdress Pay And Collective Bargaining

George Tyler 7th September 2015

President Obama has belatedly awakened to the plight of America’s middle class whose economic fate is dependent almost entirely on wages. Taking a lead from his predecessors since Ronald Reagan, Obama proved indifferent during much of his first term to the deterioration in the collective bargaining position of employees at US workplaces – the key […]

Why We Need A Cultural Revolution In American Capitalism

George Tyler 10th August 2015 1 Comment

Corporations are at the center of market fundamentalist capitalism practiced in the UK and US. Yet, in contrast to northern Europe, they are only weakly embedded in their communities, insufficiently attuned to the aspirations and needs of the wider stakeholder community. Rather than government diktats, the solution is cultural changes whereby inspired societal norms produce […]

Why President Obama Needs To Reframe The Wage Debate

George Tyler 28th November 2014 1 Comment

Stagnant wages have robbed the American middle class of opportunity. Wage compression is why fewer Americans now believe they are middle class; remarkably, the share of Americans who self-identify as below-middle class has risen 60 percent since 2008 to near equivalence in size with those identifying as middle class. Horatio Alger has emigrated to Australia […]

President Obama Is Emulating Buchanan Instead Of Lincoln

George Tyler 21st July 2014

Obama is Leaving Economic Inequality for his Successors to Fix President Obama is emulating former President James Buchanan. His economic agenda is to kick the can down the road, leaving his successors an America of widening economic inequality without prospect of remediation. The Obama Presidency is facing the most toxic, polarized environment since the antebellum […]

Britain’s, Not France’s, Middle Class Is Being ‘Run Into The Dust’

George Tyler 20th February 2014

While France and Britain cooperate on multiple fronts, the Cameron government is not above using its neighbor as a political foil. Grant Shapps, conservative party chairman opined in January 2014 that French President Hollande had “led his countrymen back into the dust” which is “exactly what [Labour leader] Miliband wants to do with the British […]

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

EU Care Atlas: a new interactive data map showing how care deficits affect the gender earnings gap in the EU

Browse through the EU Care Atlas, a new interactive data map to help uncover what the statistics are often hiding: how care deficits directly feed into the gender earnings gap.

While attention is often focused on the gender pay gap (13%), the EU Care Atlas brings to light the more worrisome and complex picture of women’s economic inequalities. The pay gap is just one of three main elements that explain the overall earnings gap, which is estimated at 36.7%. The EU Care Atlas illustrates the urgent need to look beyond the pay gap and understand the interplay between the overall earnings gap and care imbalances.


BROWSE THROUGH THE MAP

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Towards a new Minimum Wage Policy in Germany and Europe: WSI minimum wage report 2022

The past year has seen a much higher political profile for the issue of minimum wages, not only in Germany, which has seen fresh initiatives to tackle low pay, but also in those many other countries in Europe that have embarked on substantial and sustained increases in statutory minimum wages. One key benchmark in determining what should count as an adequate minimum wage is the threshold of 60 per cent of the median wage, a ratio that has also played a role in the European Commission's proposals for an EU-level policy on minimum wages. This year's WSI Minimum Wage Report highlights the feasibility of achieving minimum wages that meet this criterion, given the political will. And with an increase to 12 euro per hour planned for autumn 2022, Germany might now find itself promoted from laggard to minimum-wage trailblazer.


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Bilan social / Social policy in the EU: state of play 2021 and perspectives

The new edition of the Bilan social 2021, co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), reveals that while EU social policy-making took a blow in 2020, 2021 was guided by the re-emerging social aspirations of the European Commission and the launch of several important initiatives. Against the background of Covid-19, climate change and the debate on the future of Europe, the French presidency of the Council of the EU and the von der Leyen commission must now be closely scrutinised by EU citizens and social stakeholders.


AVAILABLE HERE

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Living and working in Europe 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic continued to be a defining force in 2021, and Eurofound continued its work of examining and recording the many and diverse impacts across the EU. Living and working in Europe 2021 provides a snapshot of the changes to employment, work and living conditions in Europe. It also summarises the agency’s findings on issues such as gender equality in employment, wealth inequality and labour shortages. These will have a significant bearing on recovery from the pandemic, resilience in the face of the war in Ukraine and a successful transition to a green and digital future.


AVAILABLE HERE

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