Contemporary Capitalism: Neoliberal Capitalism, Financialized Capitalism, or Globalized Capitalism?
Why “neoliberal” is the framework that best describes our new, post 1980 form of capitalism.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Frances Coppola: Rethinking Government Debt and Monetary Sovereignity
Debunking the uniformed and regularly hysterical mainstream treatment of government debt and deficits.
Read more...Low Unemployment with Falling Capacity Utilization… Not a Good Sign for Fed Liftoff
Why the Fed should delay its long-anticipated “liftoff”.
Read more...Corbynomics 101: A Guide to People’s QE (PQE)
Why the three big charges commonly made against Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE, are all wet.
Read more...Credit Rating Agencies and Brazil: S&P as Neoliberal Enforcer
Mind you, the rating agencies are far from the only neoliberal enforcers as far as emerging economies are concerned. But it is nevertheless instructive to compare an official rationale with data.
Read more...Spillovers of Pro-Social Motivation: Evidence From a Randomised Intervention Study on Blood Donors
Evidence suggests that people are more likely to behave in a pro-social way if they are aware of others who behave in such a manner. This column finds evidence for this phenomenon among blood donors. For every unit increase in a donor’s motivation, there is a 44% spillover in motivation to their fellow tenant. There is an overall increase in donation rates due to such a social multiplier of 17.9 percentage points, instead of the 10 percentage points obtained by calling an isolated donor.
Read more...David Kotz: Understanding Contemporary Capitalism, Part I
“Neoliberalism,” or more accurately neoliberal capitalism, is a form of capitalism in which market relations and market forces operate relatively freely and play the predominant role in the economy. That is, neoliberalism is not just a set of ideas, or an ideology, as it is typically interpreted by those analysts who doubt the relevance or importance of this concept for explaining contemporary capitalism. Under neoliberalism, non-market institutions – such as the state, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies – play a limited role. By contrast, in “regulated capitalism” such as prevailed in the post-World War II decades – in the United States and other industrial capitalist economies – states, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies played a major role in regulating economic activity, confining market forces to a lesser role.
Read more...Breaking the Greek Debt Impasse: A Solution for Greece
Greece needs debt restructuring. On this, a growing chorus of voices is agreed (Manasse 2015, Taylor 2015). Even the IMF (2015) now acknowledges that Greece’s debt is unsustainable. Restructuring is required, it now insists, for the workability of the third programme between the country and ‘the institutions’ that is currently being finalised.
Read more...Deflation and Money
Deflation is a threat to the macroeconomy. Japan had suffered from deflation for more than a decade, and now, Europe is facing it. To combat deflation under the zero interest bound, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have resorted to quantitative easing, or increasing the money supply. This column explores its effectiveness, through the application of novel methods to distinguish signals from noises.
Read more...Governance Matters
This post illustrates how dominant the neoliberal paradigm has become all over the world, and how it fails to acknowledge, much the less address, the well-known failings of markets, such as externalities.
Read more...Currency Depreciations Don’t Boost Exports as Much as They Used To
A new study has important implications for IMF policies as well as for Greece, both “reformers” and those who advocate a Grexit.
Read more...Household Labor, Caring Labor, Unpaid Labor
A discussion of the practical and policy implications of failing to measure household labor and production.
Read more...As QE Wanes, Real Costs of “Employment” Subsidies Surface
As the QE prop is removed, it will become more difficult to ignore the fact that “employment” subsidies were often simply “employer” subsidies.
Read more...“How Complex Systems Fail”
Complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure. Have we come to embrace policies and values that increase the odds of failure?
Read more...Greece’s Missing Drivers of Growth
This post mines an issue we’ve discussed repeatedly, that the heavy dose of “reforms” imposed on Greece succeeded in lowering wage costs without providing the expected boost in exports.
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