Robert Reich Gets It

Robert Reich has been pretty much dead-on for the last 18 months: criticizing the size of the stimulus, the bailouts, and on health care reform. He sums up the last 12 months (and much of the time before it) pretty well:
But if 2009 has proved anything, it’s that the bailout of Wall Street didn’t trickle [...]

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“Economic Crisis Savages Public Education”

Rick Wolff says that mainstream economics is ignoring one of the biggest casualties of the recession:
Capitalist crises, especially severe ones, are case studies in that system’s social costs.  Because the dutifully conservative economics profession rarely studies such cases, let’s do just that here by focusing on how the current capitalist crisis is damaging public education. [...]

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Economic Crisis as a Lesson Plan- Just Not at ND

The New York Times describes classes around the country, at universities such as Cornell, Columbia, and Vassar, that are probing the economic crisis. The approaches are diverse:
Steven Fraser, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, has taught the cultural history of Wall Street for years, usually bringing his students up to the 1990s. But this [...]

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More Thoughts on Disillusionment/Marx and CST

I had a post planned for today that would follow up on two distinct points in my post from yesterday. Sadly, Ruccio managed to beat me to both of them.
The first point is regarding a growing dissatisfaction with capitalism:
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction [...]

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Berlin Retrospectives and Rethinking Marxism

I know next to nothing about the history that led up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that seems to be on everyone’s minds these last couple days with the 20th anniversary. Many on the more radical left seem to be approaching the event with a great deal of caution. I don’t know [...]

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Paradigm Shifts? Sudden Realizations?

There’s a great post on Washington’s Blog about Tuesday’s WSJ article about paradigm shifts in economics.
But the Journal makes it sound like the policy-makers and economists who deployed faulty models were innocently ignorant of any larger truths:
The models “were not able to draw up the red flags,” says Tim Besley, a professor at the London [...]

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Bruce Bartlett Ignores Inequality

Bruce Bartlett makes a lofty claim (h/t Mark Thoma):
Fortunately for conservatives, the greatest free market economist of all time, Milton Friedman, found an explanation for the Great Depression that let capitalism off the hook. The fundamental problem, he said, was that the Federal Reserve foolishly allowed the money supply to shrink by a third between [...]

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Rebel Economists Converge on Buffalo

Next weekend (ht @RealWorldEcon), 50 post-Keynesians are converging on Buffalo to discuss the financial crisis. This article places the event in the context of the discipline of economics.
For decades, there has been an overshadowed (and at times bitterly ridiculed) alternative group of economists who have long been warning that the Neoclassical orthodoxy was missing the [...]

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“Misleading Indicators”

In this week’s America (h/t Felipe), Chuck Wilber, a professor emeritus in economics at ND, offers his take on how economists missed the “Great Recession.” In it, he directs much of his criticism at the pedagogy of economics.
Economics is a lot like theology, despite the former’s claim to be a science. Theology uses self-evident first [...]

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Moore on Moore

No subliminal messaging there, just some pun fun. Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, A Love Story, is premiering in theaters everywhere tomorrow. Naomi Klein interviewed him for The Nation, and one exchange struck me.
NK: All right. Let’s talk about the film some more. I saw you on Leno, and I was struck that one of his [...]

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