Tom Engelhardt: Ending the World the Human Way – Climate Change as the Anti-News
Here’s the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no “story,” not in the normal news sense anyway.
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Nate Heckmann: Peter Schiff is Wrong About Everything
Yves here. I’m of two minds about featuring a post about Peter Schiff, since criticizing him treats him as being a more legitimate commentator than he is. But some targets ask so hard for a debunking that it’s hard to resist.
Read more...Ignacio Portes: How the Left Underestimates Chile’s Right-Wing Keynesians
Yves here. Please welcome Igancio Portes to NC. He’s a sophisticated young writer who has a sharp eye for power dynamics and is keenly interested in why the left (the genuine left as opposed to the fake version we have in the US) so often fails to achieve its intended results when it gets control of a government. He’ll be providing posts from time to time on Latin America, which is too often covered in a cursory and propagandized manner in the mainstream English language press.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: War Spikes in the Eve Online Universe – A Political Economist’s Account
Yves here. I must admit to being mystified and intrigued by Eve Online, which I have to confess I’d never heard of before today. First of course is the large number of people who find it appealing to spend significant amounts of leisure time in a realm designed to be ruthless and savage. Don’t they get enough of that at their day jobs? It used to be the most common narrative of entertainment was the hero’s journey. We now see rising popularity of amusements that celebrate ruthlessness and a breakdown or lack of social norms (such as the Game of Thrones)
The second curiosity is that 500,000 people have spent real money in meaningful amounts and invested time in a pseudo-economy where the funds are stranded. And now to add insult to injury, some have taken really big losses.
Read more...Are the Davos Men Getting a Bit Nervous?
Normally I try not to pay much attention to Davos because it is meant to reinforce the idea that plutocracy is simply a manifestation of natural aristocracy.
Read more...Gar Alperovitz on Mondragon and the Potential of Worker Owned Co-ops Economy
Gar Alperovitz, professor of economics at the University of Maryland, speaks on Real News Network about the potential and limits of worker cooperatives like Mondragon.
Read more...The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
So many of the assertions made about “maximizing shareholder value” are false that they should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Read more...Michael Hudson: The Insider’s Economics Dictionary – L is for Land, M is for Marginalism
Yves here. Two new entries in Michael Hudson’s answer to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, his The Insiders Economic Dictionary.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Behavioral Economics as Victorian Moralizing
Why behavioural economics is nothing but Victorian morality passed down to the modern age.
Read more...Why Germans Should Stop Mowing Their Own Lawn
Yves here. I’m featuring this post in part as a development exercise to Cliff, a German economist who has been blogging off and on since 2011 and plans to post on a more consistent basis. He has been warned that the NC readership can be rough. His thesis: “Home production may be a popular or cultural preference, economically sensible it is not.”
Read more...Alain Damasio on the NSA: “701,000 Hours in Custody”
Yves here. Reader Mike M highly recommended what he called “one kick-ass anti-NSA/call to revolt article.” Even though my once-pretty-good French has eroded due to lack of use, from what I could read I agreed and asked for reader help with translation.
Aside from its merit as a stand-alone work, I also thought this article was noteworthy as an indicator of sentiment in France about the Snowden revelations.
Read more...Gaius Publius: `Wall Street & the Security Apparatus Want a Real SOB… Chris Christie`
So now we know why the Republicans have been going to such extreme lengths to try to preserve embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a national figure…
Read more...Has the Developed World Hit “Peak Car Use”?
Yves here. While this piece provides a solid overview of the fallen status of cars, it misses an obvious contributor to the lack of enthusiasm for them among the young: with weak incomes and in many cases, heavy student debt loads, an automobile is too large an expense relative to what they get out of it.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Greek Finance Minister Reveals Advanced Case of Stockholm Syndrome
This is a stupendous story. Possibly for the first time in its tainted history, the International Monetary Fund had a major change of heart and tried to do the right thing by a ‘program’ country, only to be turned down by that very same country’s finance minister!
Read more...Frigid Weather Puts Homeless at Risk
Yves here. Although the current spell of nasty cold weather isn’t unusual by the standards of three decades ago, in the intervening years we’ve also had a big increase in homelessness, which means a lot more people are at risk of freezing to death.
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