Category Archives: The dismal science

Jeff Madrick: Why the CBO Can’t Be Trusted

Yves here. I’ve written from time to time how openly partisan the Congressional Budget Office is, not in the traditional sense of favoring one party over the other, but as serving as an key enforcer of neoliberal ideology. For instance, its projections of government debt to GDP ratios were highly misleading by virtue of failing to net out financial assets. And after being called out for that error in paper, what did the CBO do? Make it even harder to find the data to prove the magnitude of their misdirection.

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Why So Little Media Coverage of How the Rich Are Becoming Richer and the Middle Class Wages are Being Squeezed?

Ryan Grim and Mark Gongloff of Huffington Post described one of the key mechanisms by which CEO pay has risen to stratospheric levels: cronyism and backscratching among board members, many of whom are also CEOs. And that’s not the only one that gets less attention than is warranted.

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Wage Shares Fall in the US, Germany and Many Other Countries While Financial Shocks Hit Emerging Economies

ves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyuz, formerly the Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), describes how the problems that produced the financial crisis have morphed into new, no less troubling problems. One key part of this discussion focuses on how China has adapted to its considerably smaller trade surplus, and why having Germany as the new excessive exporter poses new perils to the global economy.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?

Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.

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Can Democracy Help With Inequality?

Inequality is currently a prominent topic of debate in Western democracies. In democratic countries, we might expect rising inequality to be partially offset by an increase in political support for redistribution. A new paper argues that the relationship between democracy, redistribution, and inequality is more complicated than that.

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Jealous The New Republic Takes Potshot at The Onion for Being….Marxist!

When Lambert sent me the link to a New Republic article, “The Onion Has Become America’s Finest Marxist News Source,” I first assumed that TNR was engaging in a bit of humorous flattery, as in taking a page from The Onion’s own book in highlighting its success. But on further inspection, I could be wrong. Readers, please help!

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