University administrators want to corporatize higher education by making going to college more like going to the mall. And they’re using shock doctrine tactics to get their way.
Read more...Yves here. One of the common frustrations expressed by the NC commentariat is that we spend a lot of time on diagnosis and not as much on solutions. I actually don’t think our emphasis on forensics and analysis is misplaced. Too often, people are uncomfortable with examining deep-seated problems and thus rush to devise remedies that are incomplete or worse, counterproductive.
A second frustration, which I sympathize with, is that many of the solutions recommended by economists to our current problems (income disparity, high unemployment, increasing looting of the private sector and government) is based on restoring growth, which will make redistribution and other measures less contentious. Readers correctly point out that more growth is a 20th century remedy, when the 21st century is faces with global warming (meaning an need to start containing and better yet, reducing energy consumption) and resource constraints.
Yanis Varoufakis addresses both issues in his outline of what he calls a “Green New Deal”.
Read more...US universities resemble high-end shopping malls. They use nice buildings and good reputations to attract good students and good faculty. To pay for this, external funding – once viewed as a luxury – is a necessary condition for tenure and promotion. This column argues that this model emerged at the initiative of universities not the federal government. Today’s stress is the harvest of what universities and faculty sowed in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Read more...From a reader: “two eminent professors with decades of serious work have been dumped unceremoniously by Columbia because they could no longer bring in the grant millions for the university business to extract rent from. This is Ivy-league neoliberalism at its worst thanks to the spineless Democrats/Obama White House allowing government science funding to get pummeled while Bush’s tax cuts are preserved. “
Read more...This Bill Moyers segment provides an in-depth discussion of race. Lopez focuses on how both parties use what he calls the racial dog whistle to mobilize voters.
Read more...On the increased reliance on short term, out of state labor.
Read more...It’s tempting to turn our eyes from how the economics of slavery operated, but that system represented a huge amount of what one would now call the capital assets of that era, and some of the ways in which slaves were exploited are not often recognized in modern accounts.
Read more...Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.
Read more...Yves here. This Real News Network segment discusses what many readers know all too well, that even a $10 minimum wage fails to provide an adequate standard of living, particularly for parents.
Read more...Yves here. Lordie, anyone who has ever been on a limited income will recognize this charity as yet another version of “let them eat cake.”
Read more...You are supporting the habits of the rich in more ways than you know, including their love of water views.
Read more...ves here. Having lived through some of these developments, I concur with Krippner’s observation that financial deregulation was well underway prior to the Reagan era and the most important driver was interest rate volatility, which wreaked havoc with interest rate caps and other policies that made sense only if inflation stayed within a limited and not all that high range. But similar deregulatory forces were underway in the securities industry side as well.
Read more...Michael Hudson discusses austerity in Ireland, how US economic policy has affected Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world as well as how the various political parties in Ireland have mishandled the economic crisis.
Read more...The headline sounds too good to be true, right?
Read more...The ignorance of many highly experienced economists to the moral foundations of their work is quite alarming.
Read more...