“The Jobless and Wageless Recovery”

Steven Greenhouse, who generally covers labor issues for the NYT, has a blog post about a new paper on the current “jobless and wageless recovery.” The authors (Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin, and Sheila Palma, from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University) present the most comprehensive statistics I’ve seen on how [...]

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Aiming at a higher goal

Benedict XVI’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, delivered the opening address at the Vatican’s Business Summit which engages business and finance with Catholic Social Teaching [ht:ba]. “Aiming at a higher goal” – a goal greater than profit – while not “rejecting profit”, represents the great challenge facing today’s business leaders who are seriously concerned [...]

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Hold the paeans for economics

For all the enjoyment I receive from reading Nicholas Kristof (see my previous post), he certainly does not have everything quite right. Mark Engler [ht:cr] points out how mistakenly placed is Kristof’s praise of the economics profession: No matter how disastrously myopic they might be, it seems that economists can do no wrong in the [...]

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Our Lefty Military

The Economist’s visceral reaction is to scoff whenever a non-economist says something about the economy. I’ve seen the attitude time and again that, privileged to economic knowledge, Economists have no economics to learn from the rest of society. Yet I’ve witnessed that much of what economists have to say about the economy is useless at [...]

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We have met the enemy and he is us

Today marked the end of the 2011 History of Economics Society annual conference, hosted this year at Notre Dame. There were many interesting discussions, and keynote lectures given by journalist John Cassidy and historian of physics David Kaiser. But here I want to focus on this year’s HES presidential address, annually given by the outgoing [...]

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Robert Reich- A Crisis in 6 Points

This video from Robert Reich might be the best and briefest summary of how we got into, and may remain in, our current economic mess:

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How I Would Reinvent Capitalism

The Nation had 16 activists respond to the question, “If you had the ability to reinvent American capitalism, where would you start? What would you change to make it less destructive and domineering, more focused on what people really need for fulfilling lives?” Three of them resonated with me in particular: Chris Macklin on employee ownership, [...]

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A Nobel Prize is Not Enough

Peter Diamond thinks that because he won a Nobel Prize, he should be running the Federal Reserve. I have just two three four quick points to add: (1) The research for which he won the Nobel prize, modeling search processes in labor markets, is from the early 1980s. The mathematics it uses is analogous to [...]

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Ethics for an Age of Commerce

When I first read Deirdre N. McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues a few years ago, I decided that it was the best argument for capitalism that I had ever read. A recent book review by James Seaton reminded me that that is still true today. (Anyone who thinks that Ayn Rand makes a good case for capitalism [...]

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“The Riddle of Money, Finally Solved”

Below is a guest post from Philip George, whose website is philipji.com. The post is a shortened version of a longer article you can find on his website here. Some related posts are here and here. For nearly a century the progress of macroeconomics has been stalled by a single error, the error of regarding [...]

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