Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise, with a New Preface

Author/Contributor(s):	Phelps, Edmund
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Date:	09/01/2007
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

Since the 1970s a gulf has opened between the pay of low-paid workers and the pay of the middle class. No longer able to earn a decent wage in respectable work, many have left the labor force, and the job attachment of those remaining has weakened. For Edmund Phelps, this is a failure of political economy whose widespread effects are undermining the free-enterprise system. His solution is a graduated schedule of tax subsidies to enterprises for every low-wage worker they employ. As firms hire more of these workers, the labor market would tighten, driving up their pay levels as well as their employment.