Michael Hudson discusses austerity in Ireland, how US economic policy has affected Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world as well as how the various political parties in Ireland have mishandled the economic crisis.
Read more...Rich people typically lean right politically. Are they motivated by deeply moral views or self-interest?
Read more...The ignorance of many highly experienced economists to the moral foundations of their work is quite alarming.
Read more...Yves here. This is a short, straightforward Real News Network interview with John Weeks, Professor Emeritus of the University of London, which dissects the logic, such as it is, by which neoliberals argue against taxes and for smaller government.
Read more...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.
Read more...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!
Read more...Yves here. With Argentina one of the emerging markets economies whose currency has taken a huge tumble, its aggressive pro-labor, redistribution-oriented policies have come under attack (as an aside, one has to note that Turkey, which was touted as a model emerging economy a few years back, is also fighting a currency downspiral). And a predictable by-product is that some of Argentina’s policies have been misrepresented. For instance, it’s widely accused of “living beyond its means”. Yet as this post shows, the government ran surpluses in eight of the past ten years.
Read more...Heiner Flassbeck is one of the few economists to get into positions of influence despite being firmly opposed to the prevailing doctrine of neoliberalism. He’s also direct and articulate.
Read more...Yves here. I’m of two minds about featuring a post about Peter Schiff, since criticizing him treats him as being a more legitimate commentator than he is. But some targets ask so hard for a debunking that it’s hard to resist.
Read more...Yves here. Please welcome Igancio Portes to NC. He’s a sophisticated young writer who has a sharp eye for power dynamics and is keenly interested in why the left (the genuine left as opposed to the fake version we have in the US) so often fails to achieve its intended results when it gets control of a government. He’ll be providing posts from time to time on Latin America, which is too often covered in a cursory and propagandized manner in the mainstream English language press.
Read more...As Bernanke is about to take leave of office, attacks on his policies are becoming louder, thanks to financial markets turmoil resulting from the Bernanke/Geithner approach to the crisis: do whatever it takes to restore as much of status quo ante as possible. The problem, of course, is that status quo ante is what got us in this mess in the first place.
Read more...Alciphron is the title of the book by the philosopher George Berkeley that was most popular in his own time and is probably his least popular in ours. But in the Seventh Dialogue, Berkeley sketches out some very interesting ideas on human language — something that he recognised as being an absolutely central philosophical question and one that bears directly upon economics.
Read more...Yves here. I must admit to being mystified and intrigued by Eve Online, which I have to confess I’d never heard of before today. First of course is the large number of people who find it appealing to spend significant amounts of leisure time in a realm designed to be ruthless and savage. Don’t they get enough of that at their day jobs? It used to be the most common narrative of entertainment was the hero’s journey. We now see rising popularity of amusements that celebrate ruthlessness and a breakdown or lack of social norms (such as the Game of Thrones)
The second curiosity is that 500,000 people have spent real money in meaningful amounts and invested time in a pseudo-economy where the funds are stranded. And now to add insult to injury, some have taken really big losses.
Read more...Yves here. With this the last week of Bernanke’s tenure as Fed chairman, it will be necessary to brace yourself for a barrage of unwarranted encomiums. Steve Keen provides a useful counterpoint, that Bernanke failed even in his own terms.
Read more...Yves here. It’s been frustrating to see orthodox economists continue to invoke the Bernanke “saving glut hypothesis” as a significant driver of the crisis. That view was rebutted in gory detail in a 2010 paper by Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat of the BIS, “Global imbalances and the financial crisis: Link or no link?” (see Andrew Dittmer’s summary here). Not surprisingly, the orthodoxy has chosen to ignore this paper.
A new working paper by Junji Tokunaga and Gerald Epstein, “The Endogenous Finance of Global Dollar-Based Financial Fragility in the 2000s: A Minskian Approach,” builds on the perspective of the Borio/Disyatat paper. Readers should find this summary to be a straightforward, persuasive discussion of an important topic.
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