Piketty’s Wikipedia page says that he’s a Keynesian. Well, I don’t see it at all. His book contains a section on the public debt in historical perspective and it is desperately misinformed.
Read more...Why “groaf” is the new “growth” and Naked Capitalism readers are duly skeptical of it, along with its young cousin, “jawbs”.
Read more...Pilkington examines Paul Krugman’s latest dig at heterodox economists.
Read more...Michael Hudson discusses how Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century greatly understates the degree of wealth concentration with Karl Fitzgerald of Renegade Economists.
Read more...Randy Wray clears up some of the “bizarre” claims that have been made about Modern Monetary Theory
Read more...Like all reformation efforts in the discipline, Piketty (and fellow students of inequality) will be met by fierce internal opposition, the ultimate outcome of which is to twist his work into something it is not in order to pretend that it supports the status quo.
Read more...A fresh look at historical data shows how the relationship between unemployment and wage growth changed radically starting in 1981.
Read more...Paul Krugman discusses Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, on Bill Moyers’ show.
Read more...Yves here. The RT show Boom/Bust has an informative conversation with Yanis Varoufakis on the conundrum of the recent successful Greece bond offering.
Read more...Some of the favored children of the economic elite who have a public presence, work hard in their writing and speaking to divert attention from inequality and oligarchy issues by raising the issue of competition between seniors and millennials for “scarce” Federal funds.
Read more...Yves here. This post summarizes a paper that argues that derivatives, specifically credit default swaps, exacerbated the severity of the European sovereign debt tsuris. This sort of analysis deserves a wider audience, precisely because the prejudice of both neoclassical and neoliberal economists is that markets are ever and always virtuous, and that prices are never wrong unless someone is interfering (with labor unions the preferred bad example).
Read more...One of the more shocking things about Robinson’s textbook is the way many core features of neoclassical economics are brushed away in a sentence or paragraph as mere metaphysical reasoning. She defines such reasoning as being “applied to a use of language that conveys no factual information, describes no logical relations nor gives precise instructions and yet is calculated to affect conduct.”
Read more...Yves here. This post is a devastating critique of current Fed policy. But Alford sets his stage carefully before delivering his conclusions, so don’t be deceived by the tone of the early sections.
Read more...Paul Ryan’s austerity budget is demonstrably failed economic policy in a new bottle.
Read more...Forecasters have a poor reputation for predicting turning points into recessions. This column quantifies their ability to do so, and explores several reasons why both official and private forecasters may fail to call a recession before it happens.
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