By Polly Cleveland, on December 3rd, 2023% 
Among successful people who start from nothing, some take all the credit themselves and despise those left behind. Witness that member of the Horatio Alger Club, Justice Clarence Thomas. Others acknowledge the help they received and devote themselves to giving back. Witness investigative journalist Greg Palast, scourge of vote-suppressing politicians. Witness also my husband, Thomas Haines. . . . → Read More: True Affirmative Action: Give Those Without Privilege a Fighting Chance to Get Privilege
By Polly Cleveland, on May 3rd, 2022% Mike in hand, our tour guide stands at the front of the bus. “This will be my last tour,” she announces. “I am not the same person I was six years ago. Then I was hopeful. There was so much work I didn’t have time for a break. Now it’s different. My generation, we feel betrayed. Ten years ago they promised reforms. But nothing changes.” . . . → Read More: The Last Tour Guide to Leave Cuba
By Polly Cleveland, on February 14th, 2022% In 1873, Mark Twain published his satirical novel, The Gilded Age, an era magnificently recreated in all its greed, ruthlessness and ostentation in the new HBO series of the same name. Railroads were the hot investment of the day, fueling a frenzy of land speculation. In September of that year, a big New York City bank suddenly went bankrupt. Bank runs began across the country, railroads failed, businesses cut wages and laid off workers. The police beat up unemployed protesters. A young San Francisco journalist, Henry George, struggled to keep his newspaper going and his family fed. Appalled by the suffering he witnessed, he sat down to write a book that would change the world: Progress and Poverty (1879). . . . → Read More: Henry George: Prophet of the Gilded Age
By Polly Cleveland, on December 10th, 2021% I have reluctantly placed Tom at 305 West End Assisted Living on the locked 6th floor. . . . → Read More: Tom Haines Jay Walks Again
By Polly Cleveland, on December 8th, 2021% I picked up the new book of my college classmate, Wendy Sanford, and immediately found myself plunged into some of the contradictions of my own life. Like me, Wendy came from a wealthy family totally, obliviously, dependent on the “help.” Like me, she grew from taking that arrangement for granted, to a cringing awareness and a confused determination to break the pattern. . . . → Read More: Review of: These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class, by Wendy Sanford
By Polly Cleveland, on July 25th, 2021% Black men’s wages as a percent of White increased rapidly after World War II, only to level off at a bit over 55% after the 1970s. That’s a paradox: If racism causes the Black-White wage gap, how come the gap closed dramatically while Jim Crow laws remained in effect, and then stagnated even as Black education improved and overt racism declined? . . . → Read More: The Black-White Wage Gap: How Inequality and Monopoly Amplify Racial Discrimination
By Polly Cleveland, on July 10th, 2021% In the March 1 UK Prospect, economist James Galbraith offers the Brits, and us, two proposals to repair a broken economy. The first, unsurprisingly, is a heavy tax on estates, with a high exemption. The second is a land tax. Yes! This was the preferred tax of the classical economists, the one Adam Smith called “the most equitable of all taxes.” This tax—at the extraordinary rate of 4 shillings to the pound or 20%—launched the British Empire in 1692, by funding the British fleet. A land tax is already part of the ordinary property tax. It could be applied to other publicly-created property rights, such as mineral rights, electromagnetic spectrum, corporate charters, and patents. The One Percent own the bulk of such valuable rights, directly or through corporate shares. . . . → Read More: Taxing More from the Rich Is Difficult. This Is How to Do It.
By Polly Cleveland, on November 16th, 2019% In the mini-economy of Beanland, reckless bank lending has caused a crash. Hardly anybody has money to buy beans. The price of beans plummets. To the farmers it looks like there’s a bean surplus. Actually, there’s a deficit in demand for beans. . . . → Read More: The Big Bean Bubble
By Polly Cleveland, on April 26th, 2019% Four years ago, in The Mouse That Wouldn’t Die, I described how my husband’s colleague Zheng Cui found some mice in his lab that were naturally immune to cancer. Astonishingly, transferring special white blood cells, granulocytes, from immune mice killed cancer in non-immune mice. It turned out that some humans are also super-immune to cancer. . . . → Read More: Garlic, Cancer, and the Public Funding of Scientific Research
By Polly Cleveland, on June 26th, 2018% At a coffee break between sessions at a history of economics meeting, I chatted with a young woman professor of political science at a German university. On hearing that I work on inequality, she immediately challenged me: “I don’t believe in equality. Inequality is just a statistic… What matters are policies to improve citizen’s wellbeing, like health or education, not policies to reduce inequality.” . . . → Read More: From Germany to America: A Dialog on Inequality
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