EconoSpeak

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...

 Back in the day, I used to give talks on child labor.  I would always begin by saying that boycotts and shaming of corporations, while understandable as an emotional response, were unlikely to do much for the world’s children.  This was because very little child labor is employed in making internationally tradeable products.  Moreover, simple prohibitions don’t get at the root causes, which need to be identified and addressed with national and international policies.  Most of the talk would...

 This is about a paper I have just written for a special issue to appear in a journal I used to edit about the late economist, Peter Flaschal. Who most of you are probably thinking, although maybe not all of you? He was a heterodox macroeconomist located for his entire career at Bielefeld University in Germany.  He coauthored a lot with a group of economists who either were on the faculty there, at least for some time, or visited there frequently. Some of the other members of this group are...

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin died at age 96 on Nov. 30, curiously just as the worst outbreak of demonstrations to happen in China since 1989 happened, probably now come to an end, as China both suppresses them, arresting some people based on phones and visual surveillance, as well as some loosening in certain locations of the zero covid policy. Jiang came to power initially in the immediate wake of Tienanman Square in 1989, reportedly pulled up the ranks by retired elders, the...

 Will economic policy change much aa a result of the midterm elecrtions? After all, the GOP has taken the House of Representatives, if only narrowly, with inflation and the economy supposedly the top issue, especially for those supporting the GOP. Will this reappearance of "divided government" have an impact on economic policy? My bottom line is probably not too much, although there is the serious possibility of some major drama and damage happening during this coming year.On the matter of...

 Sorry you have not seen me here for awhile. My laptop on which I am able to post here was out of commission, but now has been fixed.Well, it was not the US beating Iran in the World Cup. It is that the Europeans, especially the British, French, and Germans, have had it with Iran over the combination of their bloody attempts to suppress the ongoing demonstrations over the law that women must wear the hijab, as well as Iran's overt supplying of Russia with drones to attack Ukraine. They have...

Antisemitism has long been intermingled with movements against injustice and elite control.  This is because the most widespread image in the mind of antisemites is the existence of a secretive cabal of Jews who control global finance and promote liberal-sounding ideas only because it serves their nefarious goals.  Hatred of Jews therefore deflects radical inclinations that might otherwise fuel movements against real domination.  This understanding was summed up in the expression that...