Facebook189Google+2Linkedin3Twitter52Print246Paul Krugman talks to the Greek channel Skai about the current Greek bailout deal and explains why it is designed to fail.
Have you ever wondered what it would look like if two Nobel Prize winning economists discussed inequality and what can be done about it? No need to wonder anymore as you can watch Paul Krugman and Robert Solow discuss the new book “Inequality – What can be done?” by Tony Atkinson (himself regularly tipped for …
We’re living in a technology malaise. Our News Feeds and Twitter streams barrage us with banality: The Apple Watch ain’t all that, the Internet is full of dimwitted trolls, and the most pressing issue of the day is whether it’s moral to keep...
In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”
There is a popular cliché that the political right sticks together to support ‘right’ causes while the left tears itself apart over internecine squabbles. The challenge back is that there hasn’t really been a left to speak of in the US for the last thirty-five or so years. Undoubtedly there have been a lot of people fighting the good fight from left perspectives. But the face of the left put forward in public debates has been of center-right actors playing politicians and economists to push ideas and policies in sync with the interests of the rightward-moving social order— hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of social apologetics. The problem today is that these ideas and policies are to some fair extent responsible for current circumstance. When self-described liberal economists like Paul Krugman pushed the antique contrivance of ‘comparative advantage’ to legitimate ‘free-trade’ policies, including outsourcing Western jobs to low wage countries, their public posture as compassionate liberals effectively sold the idea to people who trusted them but who may have failed to understand the economics. Similarly when Democrat Presidents sold bank deregulation on the basis of economic ‘efficiency’ and bank bailouts to ‘save the economy’ they added liberal ‘legitimacy’ to economic ideas that the radical right could not have effectively sold only a generation before.
Paul Krugman doesn't like Bitcoin. He's taken several swipes at the technology on his blog over the last couple of years. And yesterday he devoted a full column to denigrating the cryptocurrency. He argues that Bitcoin mining, the process where new bitcoins are created by repetitive mathematical calculations, is socially wasteful. And, he argues, that's reflective of the pointlessness of Bitcoin more generally.
Former Secretary of State for Health Stephen Dorrell, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and Marxist political theorist Alex Callinicos reimagine capitalism and the current economic system.
Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.
Not that Paul Krugman is directly arguing for a universal basic income here but it's a possible solution to the point that he's making. And, I would argue, a good solution to the point that he's making.
The old political-economic thinking of Karl Polanyi was never properly absorbed into "mainstream" North Atlantic economics: recognizing that land, labor, and finance are not really "commodities" returns institutions and social processes to the center of economic analysis.
To challenge social naturalism, Polanyi argues that labor, land, and money—three of the most important inputs into the production process—are fictitious commodities. Actual commodities are things that are produced for sale on the market. But labor is the work effort of human beings, land is nature that has been carved up into parcels and the supply of money and credit has been for many decades determined by central banks. However, to sustain the social naturalist view of the economy as a self-regulating organism, economists have had to ignore reality and pretend that fictitious commodities are actual commodities.
As Krugman's column suggests, recognizing that these key inputs are not commodities returns institutions and social processes to the center of economic analysis. This focus makes it easier to see the problems in many of the free market claims that derive their power from a naturalistic and unrealistic model of how markets are supposed to work. But just as importantly, this gestalt shift opens up space for new policy ideas because it turns out that progressive reforms do not—like increases in the minimum wage—inevitably produce perverse consequences. There are free lunches out there; we just have to find them.
Regular readers know that I sometimes mock “very serious people” — politicians and pundits who solemnly repeat conventional wisdom that sounds tough-minded and realistic. The trouble is that sounding serious and being serious are by no means the same thing, and some of those seemingly tough-minded positions are actually ways to dodge the truly hard issues.
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza coalition, is about to become prime minister of Greece. He will be the first European leader elected on an explicit promise to challenge the austerity policies that have prevailed since 2010. And there will, of course, be many people warning him to abandon that promise, to behave “responsibly.”
Steve Ballmer’s surprise announcement that he will be resigning as Microsoft’s C.E.O. has set off a huge flood of commentary. Being neither a tech geek nor a management guru, I can’t add much on those fronts. I do, however, think I know a bit about economics, and I also read a lot of history. So the Ballmer announcement has me thinking about network externalities and Ibn Khaldun. And thinking about these things, I’d argue, can help ensure that we draw the right lessons from this particular corporate upheaval.
"Talk to gold bugs and they’ll tell you that paper money comes from governments, which can’t be trusted not to debase their currencies. The odd thing, however, is that for all the talk of currency debasement, such debasement is getting very hard to find. It’s not just that after years of dire warnings about runaway inflation, inflation in advanced countries is clearly too low, not too high. Even if you take a global perspective, episodes of really high inflation have become rare. Still, hyperinflation hype springs eternal.
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