Robert Reich Gets It

Robert Reich has been pretty much dead-on for the last 18 months: criticizing the size of the stimulus, the bailouts, and on health care reform. He sums up the last 12 months (and much of the time before it) pretty well: But if 2009 has proved anything, it’s that the bailout of Wall Street didn’t [...]

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Thank You

To all the readers and commenters on this blog, I genuinely thank you for supporting this occasional habit of mine. I’ve been writing posts regularly for a little over a year, and vain as it may sound, the continuously growing number of readers has served as a motivation for continuing to think through and write [...]

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Gifting Paradox: Derrida and Neoclassical Econ

I’m in the Christmas spirit, fresh from decorating the Krafft family tree (pictured above), and I wanted to write something holiday related. As so often happens, though, David Ruccio beats me to the punch, pushing back on the typical counter-intuitive anti-gift argument from mainstream economics. Thankfully I have something to add this time, as you’ll see [...]

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China’s Great Leap and Its Contradictions

Should you have 15 minutes to spare this Christmas Eve, go read Chris Hayes’ excellent article on China in The Nation. He delves into a number of the contradictions in China’s society and economy. Here are some key excerpts: This marginal population freaks out the Chinese authorities because they desperately wish to avoid the experience [...]

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The Inequality-Bubble Link

Ruccio points out that Martin Wolf doesn’t understand the inequality-bubble link: Here’s a good question for Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times: How could a more equitable distribution of income be instrumental in solving the impact of this crisis? Especially in the UK and the USA the top 20% has close to [...]

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Some Friday Links

Here are a few quick hits on some longer posts and articles you should read. First, Daniel Little posts on Robert Merton’s sociological theory of science. There’s a relevant chunk here for economists: …the conduct of science is driven by the values that the institutions of science inculcate and enforce; the incentives created by the [...]

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Keynes v. Hayek, Modern Disciples Edition (with Rap)

Newshour (ht: jw) had a segment that featured a debate between Robert Skidlesky (Keynes’ biographer and most recently author of Keynes: Return of the Master) and Russell Roberts, who is a professor of economics at George Mason and blogs at Cafe Hayek. The debate was pretty much what you’d expect, given the intellectual influence of both, but [...]

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“Economic Crisis Savages Public Education”

Rick Wolff says that mainstream economics is ignoring one of the biggest casualties of the recession: Capitalist crises, especially severe ones, are case studies in that system’s social costs.  Because the dutifully conservative economics profession rarely studies such cases, let’s do just that here by focusing on how the current capitalist crisis is damaging public [...]

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A Letter to the Dean Expressing Concerns with His Economics Leadership

In light of the Dean of Arts and Letters’ recommendation to the Academic Council to close ECOP, I have sent the following letter to him and the members of the Academic Council. Dear Dean McGreevy, I was saddened when I learned of your decision to recommend the closure of the Department of Economics and Policy [...]

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Economic Crisis as a Lesson Plan- Just Not at ND

The New York Times describes classes around the country, at universities such as Cornell, Columbia, and Vassar, that are probing the economic crisis. The approaches are diverse: Steven Fraser, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, has taught the cultural history of Wall Street for years, usually bringing his students up to the 1990s. But [...]

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