New Feature: Friday Links

I’ve decided that I’m going to make Friday links a regular feature on this blog. Why? Mainly, the Twitter thing clearly hasn’t caught on with this blog’s readership, so I want some way to communicate links that are worthy of reading but don’t stimulate a post. Look for it here, every (gulp) Friday afternoon. I’ll [...]

Read Full Post »

A More Permanent Underclass

Catherine Rampell (h/t Thoma) writes about the depressingly permanent effects of the current recession: The big ocean of blue represents the portion of the unemployed who have lost their jobs, with the lighter blue section showing those whose jobs are gone permanently. There are multiple ways to explain why permanent job-losers represent a higher share [...]

Read Full Post »

RIP Howard Zinn

Tireless historian and activist Howard Zinn has died this evening, at the age of 87. He leaves behind a legacy of enhanced social and historical consciousness. I’ve only read A People’s History, an excellent alternative history that will prevent you from viewing our country the same. Zinn has also left behind the Zinn Education Project, [...]

Read Full Post »

Out of Crisis: An Allegedly Original Review

Realizing that it is somewhat unadventurous to merely review and regurgitate other reviews of quality work, I decided to purchase, read, and review David A. Westbrook’s Out of Crisis: Rethinking Financial Markets. In that spirit, I also urge you to read the book for yourself and draw your own conclusions. This, I believe, is an [...]

Read Full Post »

From Rights to Commons for Developing Countries

It’s odd (but perhaps not unexpected) that I haven’t written much about Africa since it became my primary job focus. I found this piece by Jason Hickel in MRZine interesting as a follow-up to this poverty and human rights post from last June. In that post, I discussed Bill Easterly’s concerns with using human rights [...]

Read Full Post »

More on “Out of Crisis”

I apologize for this post coming five days after it was promised in my post on the first review - other events intervened. I have two other reviews to cover on David A. Westbrook’s Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets. The first is by Lyman Johnson, a law professor at Washington & Lee University and University [...]

Read Full Post »

“Corporations are People Too?”

Mark Thoma sums up today’s SCOTUS decision well: Just what we need, an increase in the ability of corporations to exert political influence… If a legislator votes for health care reform, to limit greenhouse gases, to impose tough regulations on banks, etc., there is nothing to stop corporations from using their billions in profits to [...]

Read Full Post »

Housekeeping Note: Twitter

For those of you who use Twitter, I’ve decided to finally start using it for this blog (I’ve been using it personally for months, but have been lazy). Anyways, I will update it regularly with tinyurls for every post made here as well as occasional links or retweets that warrant mention but for whatever reason [...]

Read Full Post »

The Illusion of Conversation

The sum of conversations, email exchanges, meetings, and everything else that has been recounted to me leaves me with one conclusion: Dean McGreevy does not truly value an “economics conversation.” This conclusion comes in spite of the fact that both publicly and privately, McGreevy’s line for several months has been to express his desire to [...]

Read Full Post »

ECOP Still Set to Be Dissolved

The front page of today’s Observer reaffirms Dean McGreevy’s decision to close ECOP (which, for the record, is not a mere “branch” of the economics department). The university’s academic council will discuss his recommendation on February 25th. First, the nuts and bolts: The Department of Economics and Policy Studies will likely be dissolved by the [...]

Read Full Post »