Editorial: Teaching during the global financial crisis

Pedagogies infused by methodological pluralism are better able to encourage students to use stories to make connections between classroom material and the pulse of their daily lives. Teaching during times of economic and financial crises also provides an opening for theoretical pluralism. The recent financial crisis has illuminated the fractures in the economics discipline. In this atmosphere, students are interested in the subject matter while skeptical about the discipline. Teaching economics as a discipline grounded in contending worldviews is one way to engage students' interest while nurturing their critical instincts. Most centrally, the crisis invites students to debate whether deep and/or sustained crises are deviations from the normal functioning of capitalism, or whether bubbles and depressions are endemic.financial crisis; economics education; Great Recession; heterodox economics; theoretical pluralism; pedagogy; teaching.

Introduction to Living Standards and Social Well-Being

This special issue contains five articles on the subject of living standards and well-being, important topics in social economics. The authors assess the so-called squirrel cage of work-and-spend, and the culture of overconsumption in the USA and other industrialized countries. They evaluate overwork and the implications for balancing work and family, and underwork and the need for a basic income. The articles in this special issue point to a myriad of policy proposals to be found not only in employer practices but through broader universal policy solutions as well, such as nationally applicable labor standards, and access to paid leave and flexible scheduling.John A. Ryan, living standards, well-being, basic income, consumption, family policy, P.R. Sarkar,

Remedying "Unfair Acts": U.S. Pay Equity by Race and Gender

Case studies in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. have found that pay equity (or comparable worth) has reduced the gender-based wage gap substantially, and results of research on the gender composition of jobs have been used guiding pay equity implementation. But, in general, the racial composition jobs remains overlooked in the literature and in public policy. We extend previous work on eliminating the wage penalty of employment in female-dominated occupations to estimating the potential effect of adopting comparable worth to alleviate race- as well as gender-based wage discrimination. First we report the negative impact of racial-ethnic and female composition of jobs on pay in the U.S. Correcting for this form of wage discrimination, we find that implementing comparable worth would appreciably narrow the race- and gender-based wage gaps and significantly reduce the percent of workers earning poverty-level wages, especially among women of color. Close to 50 percent of women of color and 40 percent of white women currently earning less than the federal poverty threshold for a family of three would be lifted out of poverty. Second, we show that, in addition to the effects of occupational concentration, being a woman, an African-American, or a worker of Hispanic origin negatively and significantly affects pay. Not every type of wage discrimination is alleviated by a pay equity policy, which is why activists have also supported anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies for women and people of color.Wage Discrimination, Race And Gender, Comparable Worth, Poverty, Occupational Segregation, Pay Equity,

A gender analysis of U.S. labor market policies for the working poor

Current anti-poverty policy proposals focus on welfare reform to the exclusion of reforming the low-wage labor market. In contrast, we compare two policy proposals aimed at low-wage labor markets: a national comparable worth policy and an increase in the minimum wage. With both policies we pay specific attention to their impact by gender. Our findings suggest that while both would reduce poverty among working women, the impact of a comparable worth policy on female poverty would be greater under most scenarios presented. It is estimated that an increase of 96 cents per hour in the national minimum wage would be necessary to equal the poverty reduction effect for women workers of a comparable worth policy which excludes small employers. Both policies decrease the incidence of povertylevel wages less among men, since roughly 60 percent of minimum wage workers are women. Additionally, not only would a national comparable worth policy improve the economic status of low-waged women workers, it would also narrow the gap between male and female poverty. While an increase in the minimum wage would also reduce this gap, comparable worth would virtually eliminate it.Gender (women), labor market, comparable worth, minimum wage, poverty, pay equity,