Category: economics
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“Neoliberal” is a dishonest word
“Neoliberal” was coined by Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a friendly seeming marketing rebrand for the same old conservative economics policies. What Friedman and his colleagues really meant was that working people needed to be made to suffer to accept lower living standards through a rerun of conservative economic…
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Inventing the minimal state
Economists, even liberal economists, generally consider the United Kingdom in the 1820s to be the exemplar of the minimal state which is a strange way to view a gigantic empire that ruled half the world thanks to a dominating military. In reality, the Imperial State was tyrannical and huge, its…
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Agency, neoliberalism, and anti-neoliberalism.
What caused US manufacturing to off-shore and the white working class to abandon the Democrats? During the 1970s a massive change in technology particularly communications and transport (like container shipping) made it easier to manage production at a distance and move goods by sea. More importantly, economic advances in India…
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America’s “liberal” newspaper on economics in “unleashed” Germany.
The @nytimes is well known for its “liberal” bias despite its role pushing the Iraq War, suppression of stories on Trump/Russia while engaging in hysterical attacks on Hillary Clinton, its sad role in hyping the Whitewater non-scandal, its suppression of a story on Bush’s domestic spying before the 2004 election…
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Progressive Economists keep confusing themselves
Dean Baker’s CEPR published the following interesting graph which tells us both something interesting about the economy and something sadly dismal about how “progressive” economists keep confusing themselves. Dean goes on to helpfully remind us of the real meaning of this graph. Obama’s economic legacy:Months of consecutive job growth is…
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Mainstream Economics is Laughable Right Wing Trash
On page 4 of Nobel Prize winning economist Tom Sargent’s paper on Latin American Hyperinflation you can find the following statement that, on the surface, looks like a scientific claim: The two fixed points are on different sides of the peak of the Laffer curve, so increases in the deficit…
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Economics and the mathematics of the Koch brothers.
Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize for Economics and is widely cited as an authority. One of his more important papers from the 1990s discuses tax policy and uses a mathematical model of the economy to supposedly show that taxing capital gains is a bad idea. The mathematical model is…
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Nostalgia for Glass-Steagall is not a progressive finance policy
There are three main problems with our financial system: Glass-Steagall and other components of the ugly compromises involved in fixing the banking crisis of the Great Depression address exactly none of these problems. In fact, the banking regulatory system set up in the 1930s generated many of the problems we…
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Robert Reich’s economics
(Published People’s View March 2013 ) Romney, Santorum and Obama all vow to fight for U.S. manufacturing. It’s not just a lost cause; it’s the wrong one [..] Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs because the old assembly line…
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Why do we need private depository banks? II
During the fiscal crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury stepped in to take over many of the functions of the banking system. They showed they could do the job cheaper, better, and at less risk to the public. Extending this service would free up the rest of the…