“A Modest Proposal”

Scott Walker just spoke in response to the uprising in Madison, WI. He chose a bad turn of phrase to describe his plan to strip workers of collective bargaining and cripple unions- “a modest proposal.” It’s actually not a bad metaphor for this idea. In Jonathon Swift’s satirical work, it was proposed that weak members [...]

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“Unions aren’t to blame”

Ezra nails it on the situation in Wisconsin: In English: The governor signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues. The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit. As Brian Beutler writes, “public workers are being asked to pick up the tab [...]

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The Geography of Capital

I’ve written a lot about Marxian accounts of the crisis, in which wage stagnation from class dynamics leads to underconsumption and over-indebtedness. However, David Harvey takes a bit of a different tack in explaining capitalist crises in general in his book, The Enigma of Capital, from Oxford UP. Harvey is a self-labelled economic geographer. He [...]

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Democracy in name only

In an excellent piece in the New York Times, Bob Herbert uses the revolution in Egypt to consider democracy in the United States [ht:cr]. His position is that “we’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only” because power has become so concentrated in the top levels of financial and corporate America. Politicians no [...]

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Getting Past “Nudge”

Tim Harford had a great column in the FT last weekend in which he discussed some of the limits of what I’ll call micro-behavioural economics (in general I think micro/macro splits are problematic, but this branch is operating as such). Basically, Harford describes the Thaler-Sunstein policy nexus, wherein minor policies will have large impacts because [...]

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