While the thrust of Perelman’s post is no doubt familiar to readers, take note of how simple and few in number are the essential principles for creating a highly unequal society, and how easy it is to describe them them in antiseptic language.
Read more...Steve Keen, one of the very few economists who forecast the crisis, on “What is ‘mainstream economics’ and why has it gone off the rails?”
Read more...This is a bracing, no-nonsene talk from economist Mark Blyth of Brown University, who is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Read more...The current US lifestyle needs to go if the world is to succeed in limiting climate change.
Read more...Has the financial sector become too large, absorbing too many resources, and enhancing instabilities?
Read more...An interview with Michael Hudson on his latest book, Killing the Host, which focuses on the destruction wrought by financial capitalism.
Read more...Supposedly ‘competitive’ policies on tax favor multinational firms over smaller, locally-based ones and also reduce market competition.
Read more...Bernie Sanders, if elected President, could accomplish an enormous amount without Congress.
Read more...Who needs balanced trade? It’s time to challenge the premises of “trade” deals like the TransPacific Partnership.
Read more...Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky take a hard look at what passes for capitalism.
Read more...Puzzling over the Great Divergence of real and nominal yields. Ever since the Great Depression, nominal yields have been persistently above real yields Yet in the previous 200 years, despite periods of fiat currency and high inflation, real and nominal yields didn’t diverge. Why do they now?
Read more...CalSTRS’ and CalPERS’ consultant, Pension Consulting Alliance, argues for getting rid of benchmarks altogether in a desperate effort to depict investing in private equity as ever and always sound.
Read more...Greece, which has undertaken the most severe austerity, has experienced the deepest economic contraction. But the policy quackery continues.
Read more...Nicholas Shaxson explains how a “Competitiveness Agenda” is being used to set industrial policies that favor the creation of what used to be called “national champions,” as in Really Big Companies. Never mind that neoliberals officially oppose anything so interventionist as industrial policy….
Read more...Is there merit in trying to measure happiness hundreds of years ago versus now?
Read more...