Category Archives: The dismal science

Joe Firestone: Elizabeth Warren – Better, But Not There Yet

Yves here. As Elizabeth Warren inches to the left on overall economic policy, one wonders if she’s actually shifting her views or responding to Hillary Clinton trying to rebrand herself as a populist. In fairness to Warren, it’s difficult not to be deeply inculcated in flawed economic thinking and thus hostage to false ideas like “We depend on China and Japan to finance our federal spending.” I look at my pre-crisis coverage and am embarrassed to see that sort of idea treated as obviously true. But if nothing else, the shift in Warren’s stance may be a sign that the Overton window is moving a smidge away from the right. After all, a big reason the Republicans so badly trounced the Dems in the midterms wasn’t just Democratic party fecklessness, but also that the Republicans kept their Tea Party extremists well out of the limelight and toned down the anti-women, anti-gay (and outside the border states) the anti-immigrant rhetoric. That actually amounts to a shift to the center, even if more for show than for real.

Coalition Launches World War on Youth

Yves here. I must confess to not being anywhere near as on top of Australian politics as I’d like to be, and I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the ascendancy of Liberal leader and now Prime Minister Tony Abbott, save that in a parliamentary system, who winds up on top often has more to do with infighting skills than real leadership. This post shows that the latest Abbot scheme for addressing youth un and under employment is a serious contender for Worst Neoliberal Post-Crisis Policy Evah. And recall it has QE as a competitor. So this post serves to launch a watch for Really Horrid Neoliberal Policies so we can start creating a taxonomy, which helps in making fun of them.

For starters, how smart is it to throw young people under the bus in an economy that has become almost entirely a real estate one trick pony? Where is household formation going to come from, exactly? Chinese investors and Chinese-driven extraction boom have both provided a big lift to Oz over most of the last decade. Deflation across non-agricultural commodities is a strong tell that that game is past its sell-by date.

One of the things I noticed briefly about Australian policies when I lived there is that they were weirdly bimodal, as in either really well thought out or terrible. This was confirmed by some Canadian policy wonks I met who said when they were looking for policy ideas from other countries, they’d look at Australia first because they were most likely to have gotten it right. The new Abbott policy suggests that capability is being destroyed.

Adair Turner: The Consequences of Money-Manager Capitalism

Yves here. This is a terrific interview with Lord Adair Turner, former head of the FSA. Most of it focuses on the things missed in contemporary economics, particularly macroeconomics, and how some disciplinary “back to the future” would be desirable. A major topic of discussion is how wealth is becoming as concentrated as it was in the 18th century, and the driver then and now was the disproportionately large role real estate has come to play. Then, it was income-producing agricultural land. Now it is urban property, bid up by domestic and international elites who want to live in particularly prized cities. Turner points out the irony that access to cheap finance for housing, meant to help middle and lower income buyers, has instead contributed to rising wealth inequality. He also describes how the ability of banks and financial markets to supply virtually unlimited amounts of credit, against a limited stock of particularly sought-after locations, has the potential to create tulip-mania type results.

Perhaps due to time constraints, Turner didn’t venture into the views of classical economists, that profiting from land, which they derided as rentier capitalism, was economically unproductive. As Michael Hudson has stressed, they urged heavy taxation of land as the remedy.

Bill Black: EU Austerity Witch Doctors Attack Each Other

As things go from bad to worse in the eurozone the putative adults have begun to fight openly in front of the kids. The putative adults, of course, have refused to act like adults for six years and instead have lived in a fantasy world in which austerity – bleeding the patient – is the optimal response to a recession. As many of us have been warning for six years, this is a great way to create gratuitous recessions and even the Great Depression levels of unemployment in three nations of the periphery with 100 million citizens.

Paul Krugman Still Believes That “The Debt” Can Be a Problem for the U.S.

Yves here. Unfortunately, correcting Paul Krugman continues to be a staple at Naked Capitalism because he keeps asking for it.

Michael Hudson: Piketty vs. the Classical Economic Reformers

Yves here. This post by Michael Hudson is one entry from an issue of a journal critiquing Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Hudson argues that even though Piketty’s findings about wealth accumulation over the centuries are useful, he nevertheless has done a great disservice by treating “wealth” as an undifferentiated lump. By contrast, classical economists differential between rentier behavior (such earning income from economically unproductive activities such as land ownership), financialization, and leveraged speculation on asset prices. Hudson argues that Piketty’s failure to probe the types of wealth and the impact of income-generation strategies for various types of wealth, as well as his failure to incorporate legal and political arrangements means his book tacitly supports the status quo. Inequality for him is a state of nature, not a function of how our economy is organized.

Michael Perelman: Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon

Yves here. Michael Perelman gave a wide-ranging talk in Ankara called the Anarchy of Globalization which focused on the local impact of globalization. The presentation was wideranging and included a discussion of the evolution of usage and theoretical concerns.

We’ve extracted a section below, on the role of “free trade” agreements and one of their not-widely-recognized side effects, that of weakening food security. The case study is Mexico.

Trying to Talk Sense About Demography

If you acknowledge the economic and resource implications of demography, you need to favor no or few child policies. But that remains a third rail in politics and economics.

Masaccio: The Shaky Foundation of Neoliberal Economics – Life-Cycle Savings

ves here. Readers may know that we regularly savage neoliberal economics, which we often refer to as “mainstream economics.” For instance, that’s why we so often take aim at Paul Krugman, who despite his leftist inclinations, never takes them very far because he is intellectually hostage to a flawed, destructive orthodoxy.

Here masaccio makes a point that the many enthusiastic reviewers of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century have skipped over, namely, that his book indicts orthodox approaches and conclusions. Masaccio then focuses on a glaring example of where neoliberal economic theory does not match up with real-world behavior, in its life cycle savings theory.

Mark Ames: Why Finance is Too Important to Leave to Larry Summers

Welcome to the world of running a small website. The estimable Mark Ames, who is as much a litterateur as journalist, promised, promised, promised us a fundraising post, but told us he just can’t deliver the piece. I know Mark didn’t do this casually; he was a publisher himself, at The eXile in Russia and then with its US incarnation, The eXiled.

But Mark did give us a hard-to-beat post three years ago, and it deserves being reprised. So enjoy!