Yearly Archives: 2013
Internalization of the Death of the American Dream: A Maine Microcosm
It’s odd to be going about one’s vacation and, like stepping on a rake and having it whack you in the face, stumble into a vignette that apostrophizes how much young people have internalized the fallen state of the American worker.
Read more...David Dayen: Arm-Twisting Season in Washington Before Syria Strike Vote
By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen Sure, this is an economics blog, but the story of the week is unquestionably the imminent Congressional vote on authorization for so-called “limited” military strikes on Syria. And there are a variety of significant economic […]
Read more...Cathy O’Neil: Short Your Kids, Go Long Your Neighbor: Betting on People Is Coming Soon
Yet another aspect of Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian fiction novel Super Sad True Love Story is coming true for reals this week.
Besides anticipating Occupy Wall Street, as well as Bloomberg’s sweep of Zuccotti Park (although getting it wrong on how utterly successful such sweeping would be), Shteyngart proposed the idea of instant, real-time and broadcast credit ratings.
Read more...Stoneleigh: Promises, Promises … Detroit, Pensions, Bondholders And Super-Priority Derivatives
By Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss), co-editor of The Automatic Earth, cross posted from Automatic Earth
On July 18th, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. Detroit is merely the first of many municipalities to hit the wall, where the realization dawns that far too many promises have been made, and nowhere near all of them can be kept
Read more...Links 9/2/13
My Favorite Job
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
My first job was in Junior High School: Shelving books at my local public library; I guess they figured I knew where all the books were already. Twenty-five cents an hour! And when I got my first Social Security card.
Read more...Pavlina Tcherneva: The Long Battle For A Living Wage Goes On
By Pavlina Tcherneva, Assistant Professor of Economics at Bard College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
This week workers in fast food restaurants across the country gathered to protest the minimum wage in the United States, which currently is a paltry $7.25, and to fight for a better standard of living. The battle for a living wage for the nation’s poorest workers is set against the backdrop of mass unemployment and the highest level of economic inequality in the U.S. in almost a century.
Read more...Links 9/1/13
Nous pouvons cultiver nos jardins
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
I’m not going to be mowing the lawn this Labor Day weekend.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Declaring the Grand Bargain Dead Is Premature
By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Stories in The Washington Post and the New York Times have some in the blogosphere proclaiming that it’s time to celebrate the death of the Grand Bargain, and others at least raising a question about its death. I’ll go on record as saying that celebrating its death is definitely premature.
Read more...Links 8/31/13
Antidote du jour:
Wheels Falling Off the Imperial Reality-Creating Machine
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
One of the most famous quotes from the era of Bush the Younger came from Ron Suskind in his (October) 2004 article, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, [now?] and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Joseph Goebbels would be proud. No, Joseph Goebbels would be awed. And, back in 2004, what was, pre-Obama, regarded as the left blogosphere, bloggers rose en masse to claim the mantle “proud member of the reality-based community.” We know how that worked out. But a little over a decade on, we can ask the question: Was Bush’s “senior advisor” right? Do we, as imperialists, create our own reality? I’d argue that the current Syrian fiasco shows that the answer is No.
Read more...Dan Kervick: Hyper-Endogeneity
By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Originally posted at New Economic Perspectives.
Some people believe in endogenous money. They believe we live in a monetary system is which money is generated and extinguished as part of the ordinary flow of everyday economic activity. The economy tends to generate the money it needs in order to satisfy the exchange desires and saving preferences of participants in the economy, and to extinguish the money it doesn’t need.
The endogenous money picture is in some considerable tension with the idea that the monetary system is controlled by the government. The alternative exogenous money picture holds that the issuance and destruction of money is a task reserved for government alone, and that the total amount of money present in the economy is therefore a government policy choice.
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