We participated in a Room for Debate forum at the New York Times, on the topic of “Was Marx Right?” Readers are likely to say, “But of course!” Yet Marx had such a large opus and his forecasts were so bold that any fair reading has to come to more nuanced conclusion.
Read more...Yves here. Even though I applaud Joe for his effort to take on the “class warfare as jealousy” meme, I think it needs to be attacked much more aggressively.
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...The distribution of power and wealth can be, and usually is, highly arbitrary and independent of ‘marginal productivity’, ‘risk taking’ or, indeed, any personal characteristic of those who rise to the top. So how do those at the top convince themselves that they are more deserving?
Read more...Yves here. This post may seem to be outside the ambit of normal Naked Capitalism fare. But have faith! As you’ll see, this post discusses how neoliberal thinking has come to drive how some people approach dating and marriage.
Read more...Normally, I would not continue to give readers the blow-by-blow on our outstanding complaints with the company Yoast, which is best known for its Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, over a review of our site
Read more...Our bad experience with vendor known as Yoast, in a perverse case of synchronicity, illustrates our theme of the crapification of everything. Nevertheless, we suspect you’ll find our shaggy dog story to be entertaining.
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...Bill Black is so steamed about a recent New York Times story on the indictment of former partners of the failed law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf that he’s written two posts about it. And they say a great deal about what is rotten at the New York Times.
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...Yves here. This post does a nice job, if unintentionally, of showing the limits of using economics as the lens for viewing well-established social norms and biological urges.
Read more...Yves here. Teach for America is a classic example of a ploy used by wealthy right-wing interests: find reputable, well-liked left-leaning organizations that are having financial troubles, rescue them, and turn their agenda to one more to their new patrons’ liking.
Read more...Ryan Grim and Mark Gongloff of Huffington Post described one of the key mechanisms by which CEO pay has risen to stratospheric levels: cronyism and backscratching among board members, many of whom are also CEOs. And that’s not the only one that gets less attention than is warranted.
Read more...Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
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