David Deavel’s review of Mitch Pearlstein’s From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation has been picked up by First Things and Mere Comments. Deavel’s review was published in the Fall 2011 issue of Religion & Liberty.

Read more on America’s Real Inequality Problem…

There was a good deal of discussion in the media over “unfair” executive compensation, especially in light of the bonuses, golden parachutes, and other forms of remuneration received by CEOs during the bailout.

Read more on The Golden Mean and the Problem of Executive Compensation…

On Friday April 11, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, featured a front-page article on the progress made in international development since Pope Paul VI wrote the encyclical Populorum Progressio in 1967. The author of the article, Fr. Gian Paolo Salvini, S.J., is director of the journal La Civiltà Cattolica. He has a degree in economics and since he has lived in Brazil for many years, he has first-hand experience of development issues.

Read more on Absolute and Relative Poverty: The ‘Dogma’ of Economic Equality…

A recent NBER paper, “Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries,” by Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg and Nina Pavcnik examines some effects of trade liberalization on low-skill workers.

Les Picker summarizes the findings, “Not surprisingly, the entry of many developing countries into the world market in the last three decades coincides with changes in various measures of inequality in these countries. What is more surprising is that the distributional changes went in the opposite direction from what the conventional wisdom suggests: while trade liberalization was expected to help the less skilled, who are presumed to be the relatively abundant factor in developing countries, there is overwhelming evidence that they are generally not made better off relative to workers with higher skill or education levels.”

Read more on Globalization By Itself is Not Enough…

Gary Becker and Richard Posner examine the increasing gap between the rich and poor in terms of wealth and income. This gap was most recently highlighted in a report that “the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth,” and the richest 1% hold 40% of wealth. The report was issued by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (PDF).

Read more on Objective and Subjective Well-Being…

Mark Whitehouse reported in the September 25th issue of the Wall Street Journal that the living standards of average Americans will have to be adjusted downward in coming years because a larger share of our national debt is going to debt-service. He writes,

Read more on How Long Will Our Prosperity Cycle Last?…