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This paper argues that an important mechanism linking increasing rents and the rising earnings' inequality among workers with similar skills is the increase in domestic outsourcing and the growth of networked forms of production. This has multiplied contractual relationships and legal claims to profit and rents that reflect interfirm power relations. Firms with the greatest clout are able to claim the largest share of the rents; the weakest struggle to remain viable.

In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Arne Kalleberg examines the institutional changes in the United States that led to a polarization of income and job quality, a rising share of poor quality jobs, and the increasing precariousness of work across the educational spectrum. He proposes reversing these developments through a new social contract that builds on the design principles that underlie flexicurity policies in the Netherlands and Denmark—flexicurity with an American face. This article discusses the roots and promise of flexicurity to address the problems Kalleberg has identified. It also examines the limits to flexicurity and proposes additional policies to fulfill this promise.

The increase in income inequality and household debt of middle- and lower-income households in the USA over several decades led to increasingly fragile financial institutions and set the stage for the most serious recession in the last 60 years. The proximate cause of the economic crisis was the collapse of the housing bubble that caused both the recession that began at the end of 2007 and the financial crisis that erupted in 2008. The drop in GDP in the USA, while steep, was not more severe than in most of the other OECD countries and the macroeconomic policy response was better. Yet the increase in the US unemployment rate was among the steepest. This article examines this failure of US labour market institutions to respond to these policy initiatives and the implications of the analysis for economic policy.