Quiggin the Econozombie-slayer- 95% Effective

I just finished reading John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics, from Princeton UP. I had read most of the book months ago, and then a number of things got in the way of finishing it. However, it’s an easy book to come back to because it is methodical in debunking the some major conceits of neoclassical economics [...]

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Put the money back in economics

Perry Mehrling has a wonderful new book that advocates for the reintegration of money into macroeconomics. His claim is that neither economics nor finance have been helpful in understanding the current crisis because both abstract from money. By combining the history of economic thought into his analysis of the current economic crisis, Mehrling shows how [...]

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RIP Alison Snow Jones, aka Maxine Udall

Dr. Alison Snow Jones, who blogged under the pseudonym Maxine Udall, has suddenly passed away. Many of you will be familiar with her excellent, essay-length blog posts, which drew beautifully on her life experience and her professional knowledge. She also had an impressive career: Dr. Jones received her Ph.D. in Health Economics from Johns Hopkins [...]

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Low-paying jobs are not inevitable, just as profits aren’t

Ezra Klein indirectly rebuts my post from last night (of course I’m under no illusion that he has read it). He argues that it’s hard to pay workers well in America. I think he’s wrong, but this is the crux of his argument: So then the question is why were manufacturing jobs traditionally high-wage jobs? There [...]

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Reducing inequality requires addressing power gaps, so education won’t cut it

Larry Mishel has a new briefing paper with the Economic Policy Institute. In it, he argues that more education will not cure our employment deficits or our inequality. The succinct claim is made early on: The huge increase in wage and income inequality experienced over the last 30 years is not a reflection of a shortfall in [...]

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The recovery is labor-free, workers are consumers, so what’s next?

I couldn’t believe my eyes this morning when I read the mainstream/left of center David Leonhardt probing the true causes of our jobless recovery- it’s class, stupid. Specifically, capital is stronger than labor, so as productivity rises, capital profits, and labor languishes. We have both stagnating wages and employment. Why? One obvious possibility is the [...]

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Zinn on King, Social Justice

Every year, when MLK day rolls around, it’s always enjoyable to read the retrospectives on this great man. His gripping rhetoric and willingness to speak truth to power obviously inspires across party and ideological lines. Yet, as many progressive historians note, we cannot simply put King in a racial justice box. He died on a [...]

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Dollars and Depressions

In the last two weeks, I read two books that sit firmly in the world of finance and money. The first is Barry Eichengreen’s Exorbitant Privilege, from Oxford UP, and the second is Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance, which has won a number of awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Ahamed’s book reads almost like a [...]

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“Hardly a Revelation”

I’m about a week late on this gem from Peter Radford, but such are the consequences of falling off of blogging for several weeks. Economists are free to do as much damage as they like. One of the most worrying trends of the last three decades has been the total commitment of orthodox economic ideas [...]

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Influence of the Nobel prize

University of Notre Dame professor Philip Mirowski has been awarded, along with Avner Offer of Oxford University and Gabriel Soderberg of Uppsala University, a grant by the Institute for New Economic Thinking for “a research project to investigate the influence of economic doctrines on policy norms in recent decades through analysis of the history of the Nobel [...]

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