EconoSpeak

Class war? What class war? Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington  "Everybody wants a piece of Kelton these days because a simple, radical idea she has been workshopping her entire career is the next big thing in Democratic Party politics. She calls it the job guarantee... " "Once an outsider, her radical economic thinking won over Wall Street. Now she's changing the Democratic Party." "A onetime college dropout at California State University in Sacramento, Kelton has managed...

The current mania for "job guarantee" policies is making the Sandwichman anxious. I've been on the full employment beat for over 20 years so I think I have a pretty good grasp of the terrain. First principle is that there are no panaceas. My favorite policy option -- reduction of working time -- is not a panacea. Neither is yours.Like my learned friend Max B. Sawicky, I am in favor of a job guarantee -- provided it meets MY criteria. The proposals currently being shopped around don't. That...

Note: there was no fully correct answer to the Sandwichman's quiz, 200 Years, 200 Dollars! An anonymous commenter came tantalizingly close but missed on a technicality. The Adam Smith quote was correct but the Karl Marx quote was not a passage from Capital, which is what the question asked for. Below is the passage from Capital:  THE SO-CALLED LABOUR-FUNDIt has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic and...

Matthew Yglesias notes: Trump stands to gain from an Indonesian project that got a $500 million loan right before he flip-flopped on ZTE… But it also happened the same week a Chinese state-owned company came through with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, some of which will go to facilitate the construction of Trump-branded properties in Indonesia. Does anyone know what the interest rate will be on this loan? After all, it is highly unlikely that the lender has given Trump’s...

The whiplash that many observers have felt on learning of President Trump's about-face on China's ZTE telecom company from condemning it as violating US national security and violating sanctions rules by selling to North Korea and Iran has been pretty easily explained by our soon thereafter learning that China has provided a mere half a billion dollars to a project in Indonesia where Trump interests are deeply involved.  This is probably the most blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of...

Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has just published The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, which seems to be getting a major media push from a bunch of completely uncritical reviewers and commenters, some of whom really should know better.  It is not that this book is totally wrong or bad, but that it way overstates its case, cherry picking data and the views of people he has interviewed, with only the slightest of caveats.  Among those falling all over themselves to...

Folks,I have received a message from Prateek Agarwal at intelligenteconomist.com that Econospeak has again been selected as a top 100 economics blog.  We reportedly cover news items well and are not for people who do not know some economics.  We also are still in the financial sub-group.Barkley Rosser

I read with interest the article in the New York Times on the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), a cyber-salon of commentators and intellectuals who are described as fearless opponents of the politically correct thought police.  Two of their number are ex-colleagues of mine at Evergreen, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; I even co-taught a course a number of years ago with Heather.Let’s just say the article is a bit thin in the area of critical judgment and leave it at that.  I did resonate,...

On this 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s entry into the world there have been a lot of summings up.  Inspired by Brad DeLong, who posted slides from his lectures on Marx and Marxism, here are mine in the form of two Google Doc files, Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics.  They were the basis of a pair of lectures I gave last winter.  If it seems like there are way too many of them it’s because a lecture period at Evergreen can run as long as three hours.**Yes, I know students aren’t...

Air travel offers an opportunity to catch up on one’s reading.  In my case, this means Marion Fourcade’s “Economics: A View from Below”, which had been sitting in my pile for at least two long weeks.  For those wondering about her title, she has been toying for several years with the actual/mock inferiority felt by other disciplines, such as her own sociology, in the face of the pretensions, authority and worldly success of economics.This essay is another dancing, enigmatic exploration of...