No Room for Unemployment In NYT Debate on Fed Policy and Inequality

The NYT had a Room for Debate segment on whether the Fed should be concerned about inequality. While many good points were raised in the exchange, none of the participants made the point that lower rates of unemployment are associated with faster real wage growth for those at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution.

This is the main point of the classic book, Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People, that Jared Bernstein and I wrote last year. We showed tha...