EconoSpeak

Not an attempted coup d'etat, as many are saying in the media.I must credit Juan Cole with making aware of this useful term, which apparently comes out of Latin America.  According to Cole, a coup attempt traditionally involves military and also is directed at overthrowing a leader in power.  What happened yesterday in the Capitol did no fit either of these criteria.But it does fit an autogolpe very well.  This is a self-coup, if you well, a situation where a leader, especially one who is...

Is there any means of adding to national prosperity other than adding to the facilities of living?What is liberty?What is wealth if it does not add to liberty?Who should determine how individuals dispose of their free time?

 It’s all happening as I write, but here are a few reactions:1. Fortunately we see Q-Anonics, Loud Boys and other right wing crazies invading the Capitol Building and not Black Lives Matter or the Left.  Think how many lives would have been lost if it had been the other way around.2. It will be interesting to see how deeply investigators will delve into the lax security preparations for today’s senate meeting.3. In the end, it all comes down to one question: where do the loyalties of the...

If the whole labour of the country was just sufficient for the support of the whole population; would there be any surplus labour or capital accumulation?If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in one year as would maintain the population for two years, would the country cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, the...

 Yesterday Saudi Arabia announced that it is ending the embargo/boycott of Qatar, and though reportedly the UAE leadership is not entirely happy with this, they are going along with this as are the other nations involved in this, Bahrain and Egypt. This had begun in June, 2017, reportedly with the encouragement and initial support by Trump and Jared Kushner, with them buying into it as part of an anti-Iran alliance, given that Qatar was accused of having dealings with Iran, with which it...

 I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom.  What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”.PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker.  This defeats the core purpose of public speaking in the post-Gutenberg era, which is to use...

What would be the ultimate effect on interest rates of a perpetually increasing accumulation of capital?What would be the logical social response to a situation in which the interest rate on money is effectively zero?What was the principal intention and object of the early political economists?What effect does the detail of figures, the jargon of political economists, or the complexity of existing institutions have on the accumulation of capital?

 On Dec. 21 I posted on "Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble."  Mostly things have not changed too much.  Oil is still running around $50 per barrel, stocks are not too different from where they were then.  I have no new data on real estate.  Gold is up a bit, now over $1900 again and scraping all time highs, but that is not too much higher than it was on 12.21/20.What has been shooting up again, quite dramatically in the last few days, have been the cryptocurrencies again, especially bitcoin...

The pronoun wars show no sign of abating.  How to replace the use of “him” and “his” to refer to people who are not male or whose gender is unknown?  For a while I used “him and her” or “his and hers”, but it is much too clunky, especially if repeated over the course of several sentences.  Then I switched to alternating genders, first using her/hers and then when the next opportunity arose him/his and so on.  But this is unsatisfactory as well, since it doesn’t distinguish clearly between...

Are there limits to the accumulation of capital?Under what condition is there a limit to the accumulation of capital?If there are limits to the accumulation of capital, what defines those limits?