Not-So-Home Cooking: Supply Creates Its Own Demand

I just read Michael Pollan’s cover story for NYT magazine, expecting a light and enjoyable read (and it is), given that it started with a discussion of Julia Child. However, he snuck a fair amount of the political economy of food in there: Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do [...]

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Tom Palley to Her Highness: “The failure was due to the sociology of the economics profession.”

Via Econospeak (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs), Thomas Palley has written a response to the Queen of England’s request for an explanation on why no one predicted the crisis. He was actually responding to a different response letter written by Tim Besley and Peter Hennessy, in which they argued that the [...]

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Corporations on Trial

Al Jazeera English news channel has a great segment I really enjoy called People and Power. A recent series they did follows lawsuits against multinational corporations around the world. In a special five-part series People & Power charts the rapidly growing number of lawsuits being brought against multi-national corporations. War crimes, conspiracy, corruption and payments to [...]

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Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson talks to Stephen Colbert about the rise of “freeconomics,” the reputation economy, and the gift economy. More on youtube: And an article: Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under [...]

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Rethinking Innovation

Patents may not bolster innovation, as commonly thought: A new study challenges the traditional view that patents foster innovation, suggesting instead that they may hinder technological progress, economic activity and societal wealth. These results could have important policy implications, because many countries count on patent systems to spur new technology and promote economic growth. [...] PatentSim [...]

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“An Idiosyncratic Road to Crisis Theory”

Michael Perelman, who blogs at EconoSpeak, has posted an essay (pdf) called “An Idiosyncratic Road to Crisis Theory” (actually, he posted it last sunday, and I’ve been too lazy to blog about it). He manages to cover a lot of ground in ten pages, particularl with regards to capital theory. His introduction may be the [...]

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Why Are They Hungry?

Hint: it might not be the “poverty trap”… Jeffrey Sachs has a new article about…the same thing he always talks about: The G-8’s $20bn initiative on smallholder agriculture, launched at the group’s recent summit in L’Aquila, Italy, is a potentially historic breakthrough in the fight against hunger and extreme poverty. With serious management of the [...]

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A More Interesting Healthcare Debate

Given all the recent debate, I felt that we required something more on health care systems.  Paul Krugman gives an account of “why markets can’t cure healthcare” in the New York Times, where he slams those Americans who believe that the only answer is free markets: There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. [...]

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Dubner on Body Parts

Stephen Dubner (of Freakanomics fame) has a post on the recent corruption scandal, mostly in New Jersey, but stretching across the globe.  He makes sure to point out that some of those involved dealed in black market body parts: Note that the case even involved some trafficking in human organs: “Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak [...]

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Power Elites and Economics

Daniel Little has a nice summary and analysis of a book written in the 50s (which I had never heard of) called The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills. The central idea is that the United States democracy — in spite of the reality of political parties, separation of powers, contested elections, and elected representation [...]

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