How the Troika, the WSJ and the NYT Keep the Public Befuddled About Austerity and Deflation
Deflation proves that austerity policies are failing, but the media is doing a remarkable job of keeping readers confused and ignorant.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Negative ECB Deposit Rate: But What Next?
The ECB is expected to cross a Rubicon today by implementing negative deposit rates. What is the impact likely to be?
Read more...Robert Pollin and Dean Baker Discuss the Anemic Recovery and Why Economists Don’t Recommend Real Remedies
A good discussion of why the weak economic recovery has only helped those at the very top, and why economists who know better continue to enable that.
Read more...The Federal Reserve Versus Hyman Minsky (and Deflation)
How the Fed has gotten itself caught in its own underwear by ignoring Hyman Minsky and in persisting in the clearly failed strategy of super lax monetary policy rather than calling for more government spending.
Read more...Why Don’t the Unemployed Get Off Their Couches?
Why it is ludicrous to expect the unemployed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Read more...A Reflection on Piketty’s “Rentiers Always Win” or r > g
The Piketty postulate that r > g, meaning the return on wealth exceeds overall economic growth, is simply not a universal truth. This post provides a tidy and accessible debunking.
Read more...Piketty’s Wealth Tax Won’t Hurt Investment
Transfers don’t matter for investment, and most savings are transfers. Thus Piketty’s wealth tax won’t hurt investment.
Read more...MMT on a Postcard
My reasons for taking MMT seriously are simple and pragmatic: I want people like me (working people) to have nice things — concrete material benefits. Lots of them. And I believe MMT — unlike other schools of thought, but especially neo-liberalism — can deliver on that promise, given the chance. So I took on the project of putting “Why MMT” onto a postcard.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: One Extreme Europe? On the Parliamentary Election Results
Conventional wisdom that extreme parties on the right and left won in the European Parliamentary elections. In fact, only one extreme won.
Read more...Michael Perelman: Vietnam – Invitation to a Morass
How the Vietnam War helped usher in neoliberalism, financialization of the economy, and the use of military spending as stealth stimulus.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Has Thomas Piketty Pulled a Reinhart and Rogoff?
I don’t think that this is a Reinhart and Rogoff moment that discredits the underlying thesis of Piketty’s book. Rather I think that it is just another lesson in data analysis for us all. Lies, lies and damned statistics, as they say
Read more...Financial Times Finds “Many” Errors in Piketty Analysis, Argues They Undermine His Thesis
Chris Giles of the Financial Times has charged Thomas Piketty with making Reinhart and Rogoff-like data and methodological errors in his best-selling book on wealth inequality, Capital in the 21st Century.
Read more...Credence Goods: The Unique Economics of Health Care
Why health care will never work as a market good – there are extreme information asymmetries between the providers and the patients. That means, among other things, we need to recognize the inability of patients to know if they are getting good care or not (beyond a basic level of attentiveness) and the ease of getting them to believe that a lot of treatment, as in overtreatment, is tantamount to “good care”.
Read more...Is the Piketty Enthusiasm Bubble Subsiding?
Although Piketty’s Capital has garnered a great deal of praise, the criticisms were initially overlooked. They are finally getting the attention they warrant.
Read more...Michael Perelman: The Rise of Free-Trade Imperialism and Military Keynesianism
On the economic and political origins of America’s stealth imperialism and military Keynesianism, as opposed to Keynes’ original version.
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