The Atlantic via MSN – “No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there. Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being. In the 1990s and early 2000s, before tech giants came to dominate the discourse about corporate power, Walmart was a hot political topic. Documentaries and books proliferated with such titles as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and How Walmart Is Destroying America (And the World). The publicity got so bad that Walmart created a “war room” in 2005 dedicated to improving its image/When the cavalry came, it came from the elite economics profession. In 2005, Jason Furman, who would go on to chair Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, published a paper titled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story.” In it, he argued that although Walmart pays its workers relatively low wages, “the magnitude of any potential harm is small in comparison” with how much it saved them at the grocery store. This became the prevailing view among many economists and policy makers over the next two decades…”