Weekend reading

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles we think anyone interested in equitable growth should be reading. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week we can put them in context.

Links

Dietz Vollrath points out that our system for categorizing industries and measuring their contribution to economic growth are wildly out of date. [growth economics (opens in a new tab)]

Ryan Decker follows up and adds that the primary way economists think about productivity—total factor productivity—is based on thinking about a world full of manufacturing firms. [updated priors (opens in a new tab)]

Eduardo Porter argues that economic inequality is having severe social consequences in the United States. [nyt (opens in a new tab)]

Jordan Weissman sticks to his prediction from a few years ago: Millennials will be more frugal than previous generations. [slate (opens in a new tab)]

Ufuk Akcigit, Salome Baslandze, and Stefanie Stantcheva write up their research on the effects of top tax rates on superstar inventors in the United States and Europe. [voxeu (opens in a new tab)]

Friday figure

Figure from “How raising the minimum wage ripples through the workforce (opens in a new tab),” by Ben Zipperer