Category: economics
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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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The right wing fake science called mainstream economics
Here’s Greg Manikiw’s introduction to the Principles of Economics. On page 5 we learn that “Equality” and “Efficiency” are generally contradictory goals in economic policy. “When government redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor it reduces the reward for working hard; as a result people work less and produce…
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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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The road to serfdom
Is there is a book that is more deeply dishonest than Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”? Towards the end of his life Hayek visited Pinochet’s Chile and – toasting traitors, rapists, torturers, and murderers – he thanked them for restoring “economic liberty”. In 1943 he was more circumspect: It is important…
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The big union win that nearly nobody has noticed
This is mostly true: Put a union label on the new American Airlines because it never would have happened without labor. The airline’s own employees pushed the company into bankruptcy, drove out the hated leaders and escorted their own white knight onto the property. On Thursday, as US Airways announced…
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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…
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Were the Savings and Loan Prosecutions all of that?
1982 ’‘All in all I think we hit the jackpot.“ Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden after signing the bill deregulating Thrifts and Savings and Loans and 2010 If you go back to the savings and loan debacle, we got more than a thousand felony convictions of the elite. These…
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The fundamental economic issue
The big scandal of the last 100 years is that poverty and scarcity are unnecessary – except to keep the social order in place. Technology makes it possible for most people to have basic needs met, without anyone having to be poor. But that would make it harder to stay…
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Economics on the slant
[ This essay was first published at the People’s View Feb 2011 and has some notes as updates]. Most of us think of economic theories as lining up from left to right, from communism to free-marketism, but there is a whole other school of economics that is on a slant…
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