EconoSpeak

Peter writes: "I was provoked into thinking about this by a dreadful book review in The Nation: David Bell on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth.  I haven’t read Rosenfeld, and maybe she’s pretty good, but it’s clear Bell is confused about the very starting point for thinking about the problem.  He talks about “regimes of truth”, which he cribs from Foucault: there is no capital-T truth out there, just different views on it which possess more or less power/authority.  We happen to...

Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump.  He had been hiighly priased by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even conservative columnist, George Will, who wrote an entire column in WaPo praising him.  In repeated polling among Daily Kos activists he was running around fifth or sixth at...

Probbly not, but there has been some movement in that direction.  The New Economic Policy  (NEP) was the Socviet system in the 1920s after the WarCommunism period and before Stalin imposed command central planning as well ass full state ownership of the means of production, classsic socialism.  The War Communism period was a command economy, but without central planning.  Famine appeared as authorities demande crops from farmers.The NEP was a partial move back from War Communism to a mixed...

The apparently falling standards for what people are willing to believe in seems to be the topic of the day.  We have immense, well-capitalized media outlets like Fox News just making stuff up, crazy conspiracies on the internet, a refusal to accept scientific expertise on matters, like climate change, where it is as well established as it’s ever been.  What’s up with all this?I was provoked into thinking about this by a dreadful book review in The Nation: David Bell on Sophia Rosenfeld’s...

I am in New York attending the Eastern Economic Association meetings.  I was in an agent-based modeling session in which two partticipants participated by internet because they were both refused visaas to enter the US.  One was from Turkey, which I think is under strict review by the current administration.  The other, a woman from India, working for an American think tank in Toronto, may have simply been a victim of somebody messing up and being too slow in getting the appropriate...

This looks like bad news.  Iran's foreign minister, JMohammed avad Zarif, hass resigned.  Apparently he has previously tried to resign several times, but President Rouhani refused to accept it.  This time Zarif did it very publicly on Instagram, ah, the uses of social media.  Anyway, apparently there is a chance he might still be talked into staying, but probably not.  It seems that he has lost the favor of Supreme Leader Khamenei, and  that effectively somebody lse is handling foreign...

CEOs of 7 pharmaceutical multinationals addressed the Senate Finance Committee: Pharma execs offer Senate ideas to lower drug costs – except actually cutting prices. Executives from seven pharmaceutical companies — AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi — are testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. The pharma executives have a number of ideas to reduce drug prices for patients, except lowering list prices. High drug prices has...

A few weeks ago I speculated on the structural aspect of neoliberalism at an economy-wide level, the way its characteristic framing of economic decision-making may have emerged from changes in the role of finance in business and the composition of high-end portfolios.  My purpose was to push back against the common tendency to view neoliberalism solely as a philosophy, to be countered by other philosophies.  Today I stumbled across this superb bit of reporting from the Chronicle of Higher...

An edited video of an encounter between Senator Diane Feinstein of California and a group of young campaigners for the Green New Deal is eliciting much outrage and indignation on Twitter. Senator Feinstein's unpardonable offense is that she became impatient with being repeatedly interrupted and made a few sarcastic remarks having to do with her knowledge, experience and authority and their lack of those characteristics.I don't buy Feinstein's rationale for her policy positions on climate...

While the wise and up-to-date observers declare the two state solution between Israel and Palestine to be deader than dead, I continue to think that morally it is the best solution for this deeeply difficult problem. However, one leading force in sending this solution into the grave is Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, who is up for reelection very shortly. He has for some time been pushing the situation towards a hard nationalist one state solution, with the current Trump admin...