Synthesis Essay On The Great Depression

Anna Shevchenko
Professor Paul Woolridge
GPS Writing Workshop
20 April 2015
Research Essay: Draft 2 In 1930 the world was experiencing the most widespread, deep, and long depression of the 20th century – The Great Depression. In the same year John Maynard Keynes, a prominent British economist, wrote and published a hopeful essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. It expressed the idea that future generations will have a higher standard of living that their grandparents’ generation. However, he hadn’t predicted that the era of automatization will bring its own problems. Across the relatively affluent countries the real wages have been stagnated. The reason for that is that the substitution of labour with capital is gaining popularity

The negative income tax has a number of benefits in their view. It would provide a guaranteed minimum income with an incentive to work. The authors explain that below the cutoff point every dollar earned still increases total income. “This encourages people to start working and keep finding more work to do, even if the wages they receive for this work are low. It also encourages them to file tax returns and so become part of the visible mainstream workforce” (Brynjolfsson 106). In addition to subsidizing work via negative income tax, they also support not taxing work as much in the first place. MIT duo encourages policy experimentation and seeking for opportunities to systematically test ideas and learn from both successes and failures. Thomas Piketty offers a stronger emphasis on a role of government in the second machine age shift. His central thesis is that unequal distribution of wealth is not an accident; it is a feature of capitalism that can be reversed only through state interventionism. One of the things Piketty argues for is an inheritance tax. The other one is a world tax on wealth. In his opinion, a progressive annual global wealth tax of up to 2%, combined with a progressive income tax up to 80% will help with reducing