EconoSpeak

Eating is a necessity and can be a great pleasure.  It also has a symbolic dimension in every culture.  In the long history of European civilization, going back at least to the Romans, it has been a form of status distinction, allowing the elites at the top to display their separation from the masses below.For many centuries elite food was set apart by its ingredients, like caviar, choice cuts of meat, difficult to procure spices and rich dairy products.  Restaurants in times past would...

The Biden administration has announced it is inaugurating a program to incorporate the value of natural resources and ecological services into national income accounts.  The New York Times article reporting this development predictably portrays the response as divided between two camps: on the one side are environmentalists, who think this will lead to more informed decision-making, and on the other Republicans and business interests who fear it is just a stalking horse for more...

 They are falling all around meThey are falling all around meThey are falling all around meThe strongest leaves of my treeEvery paper brings the news thatEvery paper brings the news thatEvery paper brings the news thatThe teachers of my sound are movin’ onDeath it comes and rests so heavyDeath it comes and rests so heavyDeath comes and rests so heavyYour face I’ll never see no moreBut you’re not really going to leave meYou’re not really going to leave meYou’re not really going to leave meIt...

I've just learned that Barkley Rosser, the mainstay of this blog, died yesterday.  I'd crossed paths with him in Madison, WI in the early 70s and then reconnected in the late 1980s, even coauthoring a paper with his wife Marina in 1990 (I think).Barkley and I would get together for a meal most years during the economics meetings.  He was a human tornado, quick and vociferous, backed up by a vault of reading, study and thinking.  He was uncommonly wide-ranging: although his reputation rested...

 Mint the Coin!https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/debt-ceiling-hostage-update

My dissertation chair, Herb Gintis, died yesterday in Northampton, Mass.  We didn’t stay in touch after I graduated—our interests and perspectives diverged—but I will always appreciate what he gave of himself at a difficult time in my life.After my first dissertation went awry (don’t ask!), Herb, who had been on my committee, stepped in and helped me identify a new topic.  I had to learn a new set of tools, and he was patient as I stumbled through what I now recognize as elementary technical...

I don’t know how this will turn out, and maybe what I’m about to say will be disproved by events, but here goes:I think the Republicans face a difficulty in electing a Speaker that the Democrats wouldn’t have, and it will be hard to overcome.  Democrats may disagree intensely, but they all have legislative agendas to pursue, and in the end they are likely to compromise in order to get at least some of what they want.  Republicans have little to no agenda.  In the last presidential election...

 David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College in London have just published a paper at NBER 30759 "Wellbeing Rankings," which provides some provocative ideas and data on various possible measures of well-being in societies. This reflects dissatisfaction with the tendency to use a single measure, "life satisfaction" on finds in the happiness literature, with ranks of nations widely publicized based on these. Traditionally Nordic nations such as Finland and Denmark...

 Merry Christmas, you all.So, the 117th Congress is done, and Nancy Pelosi is ending her historic run as Speaker of the House.  It passed more legislation than we have seen happen in a congress in a very long time.  While Joe Biden did not get all he wanted, much less the progressive caucus, a great deal as passed, some of it, like the infrastructure bill, that has been languishing for decades. At the tail end we got the right to marry confirmed, reform of the electoral act to prevent a VP...

At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper.When it came time to start working on a draft for the conference, I remembered my blog post and it formed the core for the rest of the draft. In that earlier post, I wrote about Marx's identification in the Grundrisse...