EconoSpeak

Kohei Saito's "manifesto" of degrowth communism was BIG in Japan, selling half a million copies in the first year and a half after publication. It's debut in English is already tarnished, though, by a colossal, cringe-inducing Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion error that repeats throughout the book.The formula for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit is: multiply the Celsius temperature by 1.8 and add 32. The addition of 32 is to account for the fact that the freezing point of water is 0° in...

     One of the tallest trees in the economic forest has fallen:  Bob Solow has died at the age of 99.The modern study of economic growth could not have happened without his work, of course.  He was also one of the funniest economists I know. For years I have had the following quote from him on my office door,  which hilariously sums up his attitude to Lucas and Sargent on business cycles:"Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon...

It is a problem that has vexed and eluded Marxists -- and tantalized critics of Marx -- for a century and a half. If I am correct, Karl Marx had an intuition of the argument I am about to present but he couldn't quite bring himself to articulate it. A bit over a century later, in "Proletariat and Middle Class in Marx: Hegelian Choreography and the Capitalist Dialectic." Martin Nicolaus almost got it or may have gotten it but couldn't put it into words. The question is usually framed in terms...

Was Karl Marx a “degrowth communist” as Kohei Saito claims in Marx in the Anthropocene? In a word, no. But the whole truth is even stranger and more wonderful than Kohei Saito’s oxymoron anachronism.André Gorz is credited with the first use of la décroissance (degrowth) in the context of modern criticism of the political imperative of economic growth. The occasion was a public forum held in Paris by Le Nouvel Observateur on June 13, 1972 to discuss the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report....

 Imagine: Trump convicted of federal crimes by Jack Smith, sentenced to prison and imprisoned during 2024 election cycle, wins election and proceeds to pardon himself. The Supine Court upholds his self-pardon, Thomas writing for the majority.Are you sufficiently scared? To forestall this, he must be convicted of serious felonies at the state level:  a president's power to pardon only bears on federal crimes. Hence my title: Godspeed, Fani Willis!!

 I'm more and more convinced that the simplest way out of the debt-ceiling morass would be to start issuing perpetual bonds or consols (sometimes dubbed "Peter-Pan" bonds, since they never mature or grow up )which simply offer a fixed payment every year, with no face value. This would seem to be immune to court challenges -- unlike the constitutional gambit or the platinum coin.  The Republicans in the House are manifestly crazy, so there's no hope there.One question is how much bigger the...

Let’s get the up-or-down part of this review over with quickly: Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson is a poorly written, mostly vacuous rumination on mathematical modeling, and you would do well to ignore it.Now that that’s done, we can get on with the interesting aspect of this book, its adaptation of trendy radical subjectivism for the world of modeling and empirical analysis.  The framework I’m referring to goes...

It’s a rare day when an economist plays the key role in a novel, and even rarer when one of the supporting players is John Maynard Keynes himself.  So, spurred on by enthusiastic reviews, I sailed through Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture this week, a novel in which a woman, just denied tenure by the all-male economics department at her university, lies awake at night in a hotel room, rehearsing a lecture she’ll be giving the next day while re-evaluating the twists and turns of her life’s...

Recent events in Florida—the “Stop WOKE” Act, the rejection of AP African American Studies, the hostile takeover of New College—and the publication of an excellent op-ed about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the Chronicle of Higher Education have me returning to a topic I blogged on several years ago, but in a new light.It was obvious, and I mean Emperor’s New Clothes obvious, right from the outset that DEI ideology was predicated on the flimsiest of foundations.  The confusion of...

Sandwichman came across a fascinating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled "Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition" by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of the chapters, dealing with fracking, was published in Geoforum in 2021As some of you may know, the specter of Peak Oil was allegedly "vanquished" by the invention of methods for extracting "unconventional oil" from shale formations (or "tight oil"), bitumen sands, and...