The Genius of Claudia Goldin

Her legacy is her Nobel-prizewinning work on women in the workforce, but her research on income distribution was groundbreaking, too.

In 2010 I wrote a series for Slate examining the multiple causes for the rise in income inequality in the United States starting around 1979. The first economist cited in that series was Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Later I expanded the series into a 2012 book, The Great Divergence. The title is a play on the “Great Compression,” which is the name Goldin and Robert Margo of Boston University gave in 1991 to the trend toward income equality during World War II. (Not my clever phrasing, incidentally, but that of Paul Krugman in his 2008 book The Conscience of A Liberal.)

As you can see, Goldin is a ground-breaking scholar not only of women’s economic history but also of the history of income distribution in the 20th and 21st century. I pay tribute to both bodies of work in my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.

Also: Last week I wrote for the first time in my life about Israel, to express outrage at the Hamas massacre of 1400 unarmed Israeli citizens, and to point out that Israel has an absolute right to defend itself as best it can against further such barbaric attacks. Others have expressed variations on this sentiment better than I, including Simon Schama in The Financial Times and Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. (This isn’t false modesty. Israel really isn’t my subject.) I observe in my piece that the Netanyahu government does not bring clean hands to its imminent invasion of Gaza. Surely there will be more to say as this war proceeds. But I believe it will be a short war, and that Hamas, in addition to committing unspeakable war crimes, proceeded in the tactically self-destructive way that’s typical for terror groups. You can read my Hamas piece here.