I find it intriguing that the fact that nurses have staged protests against Wall Street has gotten pretty much no coverage in the mainstream media. I checked nurses + protest on Google News, and the only note take of their September 1 protest was a story in the Boston Herald and MarketWatch (but the latter merely published their press releases).
Read more...It might behoove a publication that styles itself as the newspaper of record to do some basic fact checking rather than take dictation from parties with an obvious axe to grind and publish it as news.
I’m going to give the disgraceful New York Times story, “Outsiders’ Ideas Help Bank of America Cut Jobs and Costs” a long form treatment, not only because it may help readers recognize PR masquerading as news, but also because the bits of this story that the Times didn’t bother to probe help illuminate how the retail banking industry became predatory and how some of the mechanisms to transfer wealth to people at the very top are well hidden from the great unwashed public. Thus, this post is a companion piece to our piece today on the rise in poverty and continuing destruction of the middle class in the US.
Read more...A Reply to Robert Murphy’s ‘Have Anthropologists Overturned Menger?
By David Graeber, who currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon
Last week, Robert F. Murphy published a piece on the webpage of the Von Mises Institute responding to some points I made in a recent interview on Naked Capitalism, where I mentioned that the standard economic accounts of the emergence of money from barter appears to be wildly wrong. Since this contradicted a position taken by one of the gods of the Austrian pantheon, the 19th century economist Carl Menger, Murphy apparently felt honor-bound to respond.
In a way, Murphy’s essay barely merits response. In the interview I’m simply referring to arguments made in my book, ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’. In his response, Murphy didn’t even consult the book; in fact he later admitted he was responding at least in part not even to the interview but to an inaccurate summary of my position someone had made in another blog!
We are not, in other words, dealing with a work of scholarship. However, in the blogsphere, the quality or even intention of an argument often doesn’t matter. I have to assume Murphy was aware that all he had to do was to write something—anything really—and claim it rebutted me, and the piece would be instantly snatched up by a right-wing echo chamber, mirrored on half a dozen websites and that followers of those websites would then dutifully begin appearing across the web declaring to everyone willing to listen that my work had been rebutted. The fact that I instantly appeared on the Von Mises web page to offer a detailed response, and that Murphy has since effectively conceded, writing an elaborate climb-down saying that he had no intention to cast doubt on my argument as a whole at all, only to note that I had not definitively disproved Menger’s, has done nothing to change this. Indeed, on both US and UK Amazon, I have seen fans of Austrian economics appear to inform potential buyers that I am an economic ignoramus whose work has been entirely discredited.
I am posting this more detailed version of my reply not just to set the record straight, but because the whole question of the origins of money raises other interesting questions—not least, why any modern economist would get so worked up about the question
Read more...This short video from the INET Conference earlier this year features a number of well-known economists discussing the question of how deeply rooted questionable behavior is in the discipline and whether the adoption of a code of ethics would help.
Read more...By Richard Kline, a Seattle-based polymath and poet
Those anywhere to the liberal side of the Anglo-American political spectrum have been on a long losing streak. As of this summer of 2011, they are wholly in disarray. In my considered view, ‘progressives’ lose because they do not have it as a goal to win. Their principal concern is to criticize the moral failings of others in society, particularly the moral failings of those in power.
At best, progressives seek to convert. In the main, they name and shame—ineffectively. American ‘progressives’ distrust political power, period, are queasy about anyone having it, and suspicious toward anyone who actively seeks it, including other putative progressives. The contest as progressives conceive it is fundamentally a moral one: they believe they are right, and want their opposition to see the light and reform/conform. Thus, they don’t frame what they engage in as a fight but rather as a debate.
There has been another and more radical trend on the left-liberal end of the spectrum previously. That trend derived from radicalized, Continental European, immigrants, it sourced much of labor activism, and is largely extinct in America as of this date. It is the atrophy of this latter muscle in particular which has rendered progressive finger-wagging impotent.
Read more...This interview at Real News Network focuses on the element of the Obama “jobs” plan most likely to see the light of day, namely, the payroll tax cut and the “reform,” meaning gradual erosion, of Medicare and Social Security.
Read more...There’s a genre of jokes about the ivory tower propensities of economists, and the monetary economists at the Fed are reputed to be the worst of the bunch. But even allowing for those proclivities, the remarks by Bernanke yesterday about consumer behavior showed a remarkable lack of engagement with the real world. He and his colleagues clearly do not know, or bother to know, members of the dying breed known as the middle class.
Read more...Satyajit Das is an internationally respected expert on finance with over 30 years working experience in the industry. He is also a best-selling author and a regular contributor to leading finance blogs – including our very own Naked Capitalism. His new book ‘Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk’ is out now and available from Amazon in hardcover and Kindle versions.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
Philip Pilkington: Your new book ‘Extreme Money’ is primarily a story about what our society has become — or rather: what we have become. It tells the tale of a sort of — although I hate to use jargonistic neo-English — hyper-financialised world in which money, or perhaps even the idea of money, has knitted itself into the social fabric and taken over. While there are some fascinating caveats in the book dealing with the inner-workings of this strange world, it is primarily the culture that I wish to focus on here.
Read more...Philip Pilkington pointed to this Real News Network video as a companion piece to our post on how executives in the coated paper industry have strip-mined their own companies.
If you had any doubts as to who Obama sees as his real constituency, this should settle it.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller
The elite consensus in American politics is held together by a small group of well-paid and well-connected insiders who are marbled throughout the world of corporations, banks, government service, and elite nonprofits. Who are they? And what do they believe?
One way to start is to look at who is being recruited to attack Eric Schneiderman, the liberal New York Attorney General going after the big banks. Normally these people stay behind the scenes, but in this case, we’re getting a nice peak behind the curtain. The best example so far is Kathryn Wylde, the chief of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, a big bank/corporate-funded lobbying group that advises political officials on how to build a more business-friendly New York.
Wylde, importantly, sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve as a Class C Director, the group that is supposed to represent “the public”.
Read more...I found this interview intriguing for two reasons. First, I must confess to not realizing that Rand’s philosophy was rooted in the counterfactual belief that people are rational. Every social science (ironically, save mainstream economics) puts human irrationality and inconsistency front and center. Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon studied how woefully limited human cognitive capacities. More Nobels have been awarded for behavioral economics, which (among other things) has catalogued numerous cognitive biases.
Second, the questions that Wallace raises with Rand illustrate how much social values have changed in 50 years.
Read more...David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
Philip Pilkington: Let’s begin. Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you’ve found something quite different, am I correct?
Read more...Yves here. I’ve been surprised that student debt has not become more of a social issue, particularly given high unemployments rates among new graduates. Perhaps that time is coming soon.
By Bryce Covert, assistant editor at New Deal 2.0. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Troubling long-term trends have gotten even worse as schools, government, and families cut back and student loans skyrocket.
This week’s credit check: Average student debt can spiral up to $100,000 with interest and late payments. Room and board charges at colleges have doubled in actual dollars since 1982.
Read more...By Tom Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and aSenior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Zizek misses the point: Austerity politics is a social and economic disaster.
In a recent essay, Slovenian theorist and literary provocateur Slavoj Zizek attempts to unpack the political meaning of the riots in England. These broke out in response to the shooting of Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police and then spread rapidly from London to other cities. Zizek argues that the riots amounted to an exercise in sound and fury signifying nothing — symptoms of an “ideological-political predicament” in which opposition can only be expressed through meaningless bursts of violence.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
The cost of the 2011 cutbacks in federal spending will fall most directly on consumers and retirees by scaling back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and social spending programs. The population also will suffer indirectly, by lower federal revenue sharing with U.S. states and cities. The following chart from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA, Table 3.3) shows how federal financial aid has helped cities shift the tax burden off real estate, although the main shift has been off property taxes onto income – and onto consumption (sales) taxes.
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