David Simon on Capitalism and Inequality

I confess- I’ve only watched one episode of The Wire, and I found the muffled dialogue difficult to follow. Someday, I will come back to the series. Nonetheless, I’m familiar enough with David Simon that I know he has a lot of valuable analysis to offer on our economy. An interview of his with Bill [...]

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Earth Day Musing- Clean Energy, Local and Global

David Roberts at Grist has a post about underground environmentalism in East Germany. The whole thing is interesting, but his conclusion is the really important part: First, what happened to industry under GDR is what happens when decisions are controlled by a small group of people, usually people who own — or have financial or [...]

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A Divine Economy

Marquette University theologian Stephen Long describes a “theological economics” in his book, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (2000). He does this in a particularly useful way, by providing a taxonomy of theological approaches to understanding the economy (see this review by Josh Sweeden). First is the “dominant tradition,” which includes writers who use a “Weberian strategy” [...]

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Capitalization–>Deadweight Loss

[source] The Banksy quote above made me think of the financial sector, which because of its strong monetary capitalization, captures a disproportionate share of human capital and uses it to little societal benefit. I had never thought of this parallel with the advertising industry, but it’s a good analogy for how capital creates sectors that [...]

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“Neither egoism nor altruism without the market”

The blog Sleepykid posts an essay from a 2007 issue of Harper’s, by David Graeber, an anthropologist. I found the following section striking: PROPOSITION I: NEITHER EGOISM NOR ALTRUISM IS A NATURAL URGE; THEY IN FACT ARISE IN RELATION TO EACH OTHER AND NEITHER WOULD BE CONCEIVABLE WITHOUT THE MARKET First of all, I should [...]

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A request

I used to have the impression that most anyone who did not do or study heterodox economics was hostile to it. What I am now finding to be the case is that most people don’t even know that heterodox economics exists. This is especially true among graduate students, and new PhDs and young scholars. It [...]

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Central Tenets of Capitalism Disproved

via The Onion [ht:cr]: Upending more than two centuries of free-market theory, leading economists across the globe announced Thursday that the fundamental principles of capitalism had been “irrefutably disproved” by the continued existence of the designer fruit-basket company Edible Arrangements. According to experts, the Connecticut-based franchise, which arranges skewered pieces of fruit into displays vaguely [...]

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“Racism, extreme materialism, and militarism”

Just as MLK arrived in Memphis 43 years ago today to support his often overlooked work for social justice, he gave a landmark speech in his equally overlooked work for peace. At the Riverside Church in New York City, King spoke prophetically against the Vietnam war. He also demonstrated in this speech, better than in [...]

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Our tortured state

It is no longer surprising to see just how bold economists can be in research topics. This time, it is Baliga and Ely’s game-theoretic model of torture, as a principle-agent game, with the expressed hope of determining policy implications. The abstract provides a good summary of the paper, which finds that detaining suspects indefinitely is of [...]

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