Category Archives: The dismal science

How to Calculate the Costs of #MedicareForAll Properly

A takedown of the Mercatus #MedicareForAll debacle from MMT’s macro-economic bookkeeping perspective.

Empires, Past and Present

Which countries fit criteria that would lead them to be classified as empires?

Richard Murphy: Writers of Labour’s “Fiscal Rule” Lash Themselves to the Austerity Mast

Labour’s economists show their Third Way colors and advocate austerity-generating policy rules that might as well have been penned by former Treasury Secretary, later Citigroup vice chairman Bob Rubin.

Michael Hudson: Life and Thought – An Autobiography

Michael Hudson discusses his life as a young Communist intellectual, how he became interested in economics and finance, his life in academia, and his recent work on rentier capitalism and debt jubilees.

How Hedge Fund Activists Coopted “Shareholder Democracy”

How hedge fund activists, who largely operate as a type of corporate raider, have subverted the notion of “shareholder democracy” and what can be done to rein them in.

The Explicable Mystery of the National Debt

Why US Treasury bond issuance and Federal deficits are functionally not debt at all.

Economy of Intangibles

Has the rising role of intangibles, as in intangible assets. helped cause secular stagnation?

Reproducibility Crisis Reaches All Randomised Controlled Trials

Social and medical sciences depend on randomised controlled trials, even though they harbor more assumptions and biases than commonly understood.

Leaving Money on the Table: Declining Responsiveness and the Productivity Slowdown

Job reallocation is an important determinant of productivity. This column uses US data to show that a decline in the degree of job reallocation in response to shocks is behind the overall fall in the rate of reallocation over the past decades.

Interview: Teaching Graham Elwood Modern Money, and How the Progressive Media Gets It Wrong

A case study in teaching modern money to a progressive who unknowingly has swallowed neoliberal economic ideas.

Koch Money and the Unflappable Economist

Mirowski on the Koch brothers scandal at George Mason University.

Why Italy’s Crisis Is the Left’s Crisis

Why framing the political struggle in Italy as mainstream versus populist shifts focus away from the most important issue, Eurozone reform, where the battle is mercantilists versus Keynesians.

The World Cup: The Dismal Science and the Beautiful Game

A light-hearted economic analysis of the World Cup

Bill Black: Democrats Should Reject Bernanke’s ‘Wily E. Coyote’ Criticism of Trump’s Deficits

Bernanke engages in a new episode of ideologically motivated economic prognostication.