Email from Levy Economics Institute Inaugural Capitol Hill event, upcoming lecture, and more THE LEVY NEWS Our Site Research Events Publications CONTRIBUTE November 25, 2025 HIGHLIGHTS   Friends, This month, the Levy Economics Institute took a significant step in our mission to bridge rigorous, real-world economic analysis with the practical needs of policymakers with the inaugural event in our new Capitol Hill series. The topic, "Rethinking the Federal Reserve Policy Framework and Independence” moved beyond abstract principles to explore the parameters of independence, the nature of Federal Reserve accountability, and the effectiveness of its existing policy tools. With critical contributions from Claudia Sahm (New Century Advisors), Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, former Chicago Fed Senior Analyst William Bergman, and Senior Scholar James Galbraith—who drafted the Humphrey-Hawkins Act's language governing monetary policy hearings—our dialogue was firmly grounded in a key premise: the Fed’s primary accountability to the public flows from Congressional oversight, not the executive branch. The event was moderated by Claire Jones, US Economics Editor at the Financial Times. Together, we explored how to balance the Fed's operational independence with democratic accountability to ensure that monetary and financial stabilization policies serve the broad public interest. This series represents a critical channel for injecting our distinctive research on financial instability, employment, and inequality directly into the legislative arena. I was also honored to deliver the keynote at the joint Global Forum for Social and Solidarity Economy (GSEF) and International Centre of Research and Information on the Public, Social and Cooperative Economy (CIRIEC) conferences in Bordeaux on October 29. The conferences were a gathering of nearly 10,000 registrants examining alternatives to an economic model that produces widespread precarity. In my address, I argued that the broken postwar promise of generational progress was a policy choice, not an inevitability, as neoliberal governments abandoned their covenant to ensure material security for all. This public abdication has left a void filled by the inspiring, yet fundamentally insufficient, efforts of the solidarity economy. While a testament to human mutual aid, the fact that such efforts are needed for basic survival is a measure of our collective failure. I charted a path for democratic renewal centered on reclaiming the government’s essential role—establishing permanent policies, including true full employment, to provide the foundation of dignity from which a truly participatory society can be built. My remarks can now be read as a Levy policy note. This month, the Institute also partnered with the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) for a special event titled "Advancing the Landscape of the Care Economy." The session explored the latest research and data on care work from a feminist economics perspective, focusing on two critical areas: contemporary advancements in research and methodology on public investment in care, and the evolution of data infrastructure like time-use surveys. Organized by Levy Institute Research Scholar Aashima Sinha, the panel featured leading experts, including Levy Scholars Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Nancy Folbre, and highlighted how feminist economic principles at the core of IAFFE and Levy Institute research ensure the technical rigor needed to drive meaningful policy change and identify future priorities for the field. Sincerely, Pavlina R. Tcherneva President Levy Economics Institute   EVENTS   Lecture | Monetary Policy Transmission to Consumption: Inequalities by Gender and Race Blithewood Conference Room, Bard College Campus Join us Thursday, December 4 at 5 PM for a discussion at Blithewood with Professor Aina Puig.  This discussion explores a paper estimating the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on household consumption, with additional analysis of labor market and income responses, disaggregated by gender and race. Puig finds that contractionary monetary policy reduces consumption more for black than white households, with the largest declines among households headed by black women. These gaps persist after accounting for differences in household education, debt, and income, but are partly explained by differences in marital status and spousal insurance against shocks [...] Read More   FEATURED PUBLICATIONS   BLOG | The US Economy amid Rising Global Uncertainty by Francesco Ruggeri, Riccardo Pariboni, and Giuliano T. Yajima Two crucial questions drive the recently published Levy Institute working paper from Francesco Ruggeri, Riccardo Pariboni, and Research Scholar Giuliano Toshiro Yajima: (1) how is it possible to have trends in income and consumption inequality as divergent as those observable in the US in the last decades; and (2) what happens when households spend more than their income by borrowing, largely because they want to “keep up” with others? As they argue, the answers are strictly interwoven. Read More Strategic Analysis, Oct. 2025 | The US Economy amid Rising Global Uncertainty by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Giuliano T. Yajima, and Gennaro Zezza Contrary to upbeat announcements on the prospects for the US economy from the current administration in Washington, economic conditions are softening for this year. The market for labor is increasing anemically after the significant downward adjustments to the earlier months of 2025 and the disappointing reports in recent months that showed small numbers of new jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up as did the jobless claims for August. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Household Spending showed a broad-based decrease in the rate of growth: from 4.5 percent in April to 4.1 percent in August—the lowest level since April 2021. The same survey, however, showed that the share of consumers making large purchases increased from April to August of this year, perhaps due to worries about American tariffs causing forthcoming price increases. In the same survey, the expected year-ahead growth in necessary spending decreased over the past four months. This is in concert with the decline in consumer confidence reported in September. Read More Featured Working Paper | The Death of the Social Contract and the Enshittification of Jobs by Pavlina R. Tcherneva In this paper, Institute President Pavlina R. Tcherneva employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, the “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, and the “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. Tcherneva identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification and concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can reengineer the labor market. Read More Featured Working Paper | Creative Destruction Meets Financial Instability: Toward a New Synthesis by Leonardo Burlamaqui Leonardo Burlamaqui reconstructs Joseph Schumpeter’s major works to propose a coherent new departure point for analyzing economic and social change. The originality of this reconstruction lies in recovering Schumpeter’s neglected concept of the “secondary wave,” buried in Business Cycles (1939), which anchors financial fragility within the creative destruction paradigm and provides the bridge to Keynes’s liquidity preference and Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis. Reconstructed in this way, Schumpeter’s trilogy yields a framework in which credit, innovation, technological disruptions, and financial fragility are inseparable. The synthesis illuminates both the resilience and the instabilities of contemporary capitalism and, when extended, helps to explain the logic of “hybrid institutional architectures." Read More GRADUATE PROGRAMS   Join our next information session on Zoom, December 5th at 12:00 PM EST. . As our Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy Early Decision deadline approaches on January 15th, we want to highlight the exciting work our current students and alumni are doing. We released a new page on our Graduate Programs website demonstrating the career paths in policy, academia, and the private sector that our programs empower Levy's students to pursue during and after their time in our programs. Brendon Bennett | 2nd year Levy MS—Brendon was a winner of the 20th AFIT-AFEE student paper competition for his piece, "Provisioning Regimes: How Economies Evolve." Brendon has also accepted an exciting position at New York' State's Assembly in their Graduate Intern program, where he will gain hands-on experience with legislative research, policy analysis, and the state budget process. Emilia Cooper | 2nd year Levy MS—After being selected in the Global Essay Competition for a paper about neocolonialism in the green energy transition, Emilia Cooper participated in the St. Gallen Symposium in Switzerland this past spring. This summer, Emi was the Racial Justice and Neighborhood Equity Fellow at New Economy Project performing research and outreach about financial inequities in NYC. She developed an interactive mapping tool to illustrate banking access disparities between communities. She has accepted an internship with the Restoring Promise Team at the Vera Institute of Justice. Henry Mielarczyk | 1st year Levy MS—Henry joined Levy this fall with experience working in congressional offices. In addition to his studies, Henry has joined as Policy and Outreach Assistant for the Levy Institute, helping with Institute's new Capitol Hill Series. Henry has also accepted the Graduate Intern program position in New York State's Assembly. This full-time position will provide invaluable policy and legislative experience, along with experience managing a team of undergraduate interns for a variety of projects. IN THE NEWS   Senior Levy Scholar Ajit Zacharias participated as a featured speaker on Day 2 of Gendering Macroeconomics, held during the 29th Annual Conference of the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM). During the event, Senior Scholar Thomas Masterson also presented results from a forthcoming chapter on a comparative intersectional analysis of time and income poverty in the US and South Africa. The conference marked an important step toward integrating gender perspectives and feminist economics within heterodox macroeconomic research. Over three days, more than 400 participants engaged in plenaries, workshops, and discussions focused on advancing inclusive and gender-aware economic analysis. On November 13, Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, discussed President Pavlina R. Tcherneva's new working paper in a blog post titled "The enshittification of labor." The blog discusses how Tcherneva aptly applies the concept of Enshittification to the labor market—advocating for a job guarantee as a remedy. Tcherneva was also featured by the Marketplace morning report, to discuss recent downward trends in the labor market. How did you like this email?   Our Website | Press Room | Donate   Levy Economics Institute | Blithewood Bard College | Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 US Unsubscribe | Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice