Rewarding work : how to restore participation and self-support to free enterprise / Edmund S. Phelps.

Author
Phelps, Edmund S. [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.
Description
viii, 198 pages ; 24 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks HC110.S9 P47 1997 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    • Edmund Phelps underscores the importance of earning a respectable wage to foster self-worth and responsibility. He shows that earning such a wage has been increasingly hard for those at the low end of the wage distribution as productivity has come to rely more on knowledge and skills and less on brawn and hard work. A crucial task for our economic and political system, Phelps asserts, is to devise methods to help less productive workers draw a reasonable wage, thereby reintegrating them into the economic mainstream. Phelp's solution is a graduated schedule of tax subsidies to enterprises for every low-wage worker they employ. As firms hired more of these workers, the labor market would tighten and pay levels would rise. Ultimately the program would be largely self-financing, because its cost would be offset by reductions in the cost of welfare, crime, and medical care - as well as by taxes paid by formerly unemployed workers.
    • Rewarding Work is an essay in what could be called economic engineering - in this case, the engineering of wage structures to help low-wage American workers achieve self-sufficiency and self-respect.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-194) and index.
    Contents
    • 1. Why Work?
    • 2. America's Second-Class Workers
    • 3. The Decline of Labor
    • 4. The Damage to Others
    • 5. Is It Culture?
    • 6. Economic Sources
    • 7. The Role of the Welfare System
    • 8. The Market-Based Solution
    • 9. The Case for the Market-Based Solution
    • 10. The Flaws in Other Approaches
    • 11. Reply to Objections
    • Cost of the Model Wage Subsidy Plan.
    ISBN
    • 0674094956 ((alk. paper))
    • 9780674094956 ((alk. paper))
    • 0674094964 ((pbk.))
    • 9780674094963 ((pbk.))
    LCCN
    96050204
    OCLC
    35986380
    Other standard number
    • ZBWT00739520
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