“Pragmatic Inquiry” and Economics

At Understanding Society, Daniel Little has an excellent post about the different views towards pragmatism in intellectual circles. Intellectuals are sometimes accused of being out of touch with the real world. But there is a strong thread of intellectual life that proceeds on the basis of a commitment to linking thought to action, theory to [...]

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An Aid Skirmish

Last week, Mark Thoma had a roundup (can’t link the specific post because his page won’t load…) over a three-way heavyweight battle in the aid world (I love applying sports lingo to academia, by the way). It appears to have started when Jeff Sachs had an article in HuffPo called “Aid Ironies,” in which he [...]

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Rethinking Humanitarianism

Costas Douzinas has a lengthy (understatement) article in the Monthly Review that provides another take on humanitarianism and human rights. Weaving together moral philosophy, geopolitics, and much more, Douzinas offers a critique that would make Bono weep. I don’t feel nearly erudite enough to comment much more; you need to take 30 minutes out of [...]

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Rethinking Keynes and the Neoclassical Synthesis

In a blog post at the Financial Times’ Economists’ Forum (h/t Mark Thoma), Roger Farmer, a professor of Economics at UCLA, discusses forthcoming work that offers a new interpretation of Keynes distinct from “sticky price” arguments. I think Farmer makes a couple of really good points about how Keynes is often interpreted in a way [...]

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What’s Wrong with the Board

From The New Yorker: When Citigroup and Bank of America held their annual meetings last month, shareholders were in an understandably surly mood. Even as the companies’ C.E.O.s apologized for past failures and vowed to do better, shareholders blasted the executives for their incompetence, and talked about the need for dramatic change. Yet, after all [...]

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Ecocomics

I’m not sure I like the title of this new blog (it seems to indicate environmentally/ecologically oriented comics), but I do like the content (h/t Ezra Klein). Incidentally, the latest entry is about Labor Unions on Krypton. Read it!

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Art and Urban Regeneration

“Post No Bills, Post Pretty ART” As the impact of the current downturn in the global economy worsens, and more and more storefronts are being abandoned and boarded up, we expect to see more street art urban regeneration projects like ‘Post No Bills, Post Pretty ART’ in in downtown Edmonton, AB. A group of local [...]

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Righteous Dopefiend

Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg’s latest ethnography gives an excellent portrayal of the construction and contestation of economic networks among the homeless in urban San Francisco. This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. [...] The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, [...]

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Living in Less

Home sizes are shrinking… Though the square footage of new houses tends to dip modestly in recessions, the size of the American home has essentially increased since 1973. But that changed last year, when the size of the typical house suddenly shrunk by 11%. That appears to be faster than at any time since the [...]

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Crime and the Economy

From the LA Times: The economy is a wreck, and crime is down. Does that mean hard times and lawbreaking aren’t linked? [...] As L.A.’s most recent crime data suggest, high unemployment doesn’t necessarily translate directly into high crime rates. But that’s because the specific economic pinch in itself is not the immediate cause of [...]

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