EconoSpeak

Passivity is a key term in Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle: 12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. 13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the...

This is probably Donald Trump's biggest mistakes, his refusal to certify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and his fullout abrogation of it by announcing the reimposition of full economic sanctions against Iran, although we had not fully undone those sanctions anyway.  An immediate victim in the US of this action will be Boeing workers who were to benefit from a $3 billion contract Boeing had with Iran, now cancelled by order of the US government.  Needless to say,...

In celebration of Karl Marx's 200th birthday, Sandwichman is offering a $200 (Canadian) prize to the first person who answers the following two-part question:  In what passage of The Wealth of Nations did Adam Smith commit the lump-of-labor fallacy (i.e., assume a fixed amount of work to be done) and in what passage of Capital did Karl Marx disparage the assumption as dogma and prejudice? Post your answers in comments.

“Guaranteed jobs programs, creating floors for wages and benefits, and expanding the right to collectively bargain are exactly the type of roles that government must take to shift power back to workers and our communities,” -- Senator Kirsten Gillibrand"By strengthening their bargaining power and eliminating the threat of unemployment once and for all, a federal job guarantee would bring power back to the workers where it belongs." -- Mark Paul, William Darity, Jr., and Darrick...

Let me say that if Donald Trump is able to finalize a serious agreement in Korea that brings an official end to the war there as well as establishing some kind of peaceful settlement in general that leads to some sort of mutually acceptable arrangement between the two Koreas that maintains a peaceful situation for some reasonably lengthy time into the future, pretty much irrespective of the exact details, I shall applaud.  I shall not even hold my nose if somehow he gets the Nobel Peace...

My title was the heading of Figure 19 in something from Deutsche Bank that has John Cochrane all stressed out over a pending debt crisis again. This graph is gorgeous. US deficits have, historically, been driven overwhelmingly by the state of the business cycle, and have very little to do with tax policies and spending decisions that dominate press coverage. In booms, income rises, so tax rate times income rises. In busts, the opposite, plus "automatic stabilizer" spending kicks in. Until...

Yes, it is May Day, time to think about workers and socialism, while Vladimir Putin gets himself inaugurated for another term as President of Russia, with military vehicles parading In Red Square like they used to for the glory of the workers, but today for the glory of President Putin.So, a couple of weeks ago there was a conference at the New School honoring Duncan Foley, who seems to be gradually retiring, half time to quarter time, I am not sure.  It is my understanding that this...

Last week I was browsing through one of the books on the shelf at work, which had in it three essays by the inter-war German Marxist Karl Korsch. One of the essays, a 1932 introduction to Capital mentioned mentioned a section in Chapter 24, "The So-Called Labour Fund" as exemplary of Marx's critique of political economy. The "labour fund" was more commonly known as the wages-fund, the doctrine famously recanted by John Stuart Mill in 1869.After it had been repudiated in various degrees by...

There has been a bit of commotion recently about the Job Guarantee idea (AKA employer of last resort). I don't consider myself an opponent of the strategy but I do have several reservations about its political feasibility, the marketing rhetoric of its advocates, and its economic and administrative transparency. Some of these concerns I share with an analysis presented by Robert LaJeunesse in his 2009 book, Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy. For that reason, it...

This past Friday there was yet another retirement conference, this time honoring "Mr. Social Capital," Robert S. Putnam, who is retiring from Harvard's Kennedy School at age 77.  I was not invited, but I know some people who attended, including my sister and brother-in-law, the latter speaking at the dinner as family, the brother of  Bob's wife, Rosemary.  As it is, I have known Bob Putnam since before he became Robert S. "Mr. Social Capital" Putnam.  That came especially with the...