Research Catalog

Rewarding work : how to restore participation and self-support to free enterprise

Title: Rewarding work : how to restore participation and self-support to free enterprise / Edmund S. Phelps.
Author: Phelps, Edmund S.
Publication: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	HC110.S9 P47 1997	Off-site
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	HC110.S9 P47 1997	Off-site

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Details

Description

viii, 198 pages; 25 cm

Summary

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.

Subject

Employment subsidies > United States

Bibliography (note)

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)

LCCN

96050204

OCLC

ocm35986380

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries