In light of the extreme imprecision, and even obfuscation, surrounding the concept of "middle classness" this working paper examines it critically, identifying it with the individual's enjoyment of a particular measure of comfort, security and opportunity. Historically these were founded on...

This working paper takes up recent data regarding the reported withdrawal of individuals from the job market and the "dating/marriage market" in light of Edward Castronova's argument that the emergence of "virtual" worlds (i.e. video gaming and other such entertainment) will be an increasingly...

This working paper utilizes income data to evaluate the claim that in the United States a middle class existence has come to require two full-time incomes where formerly it had commonly required only one. To that end it makes an argument for the usefulness of measuring income in relation to per...

This working paper takes up the familiar theme of the decline of Gross Domestic Product and Gross World Product growth since the 1960s, making original calculations from World Bank data to estimate the consequences of a counterfactual continuation of post-war boom-era growth rates, the actual...

This working paper examines American perceptions of the Soviet Union's military capability during the Cold War, concentrating on the contradictions between the claims made for the Soviet system's capacity to generate a "full-spectrum" military threat to the West (and therefore an object of...

This working paper addresses the matter of Japan's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth from 1990 on (and in particular the slowness of its growth relative to other advanced industrial states). Taking into account the sharp contraction of its working-age population, it presents calculations of...

This working paper takes up the subject of the highly publicized announcements of the German and Japanese governments of sharply increasing their defense spending and puts it into context. In particular it considers1. The longer history of Germany and Japan's movement away from their post-World...

This note, acknowledging the ambiguities in the discussion of deindustrialization due to the scarcity of data on countries' real manufacturing output over time, considers Britain's output between the 1970s and the present as calculated in 2015 U.S. dollars both through the use of deflators to...

This paper extends the author's prior use of CPI-adjusted current dollar figures to examine American and British deindustrialization by similarly using the method to adjust United Nations current dollar figures regarding these nations' manufacturing output alongside the data for Germany and...

This working paper takes up the question of the "decline" of the neoliberal economic model. Acknowledging the reality of not only the generally weak growth during which that model has prevailed (from the late 1970s on) but the post-Great Recession slowdown in that growth, with its implications...