EconoSpeak

Matthew Yglesias notes: Trump stands to gain from an Indonesian project that got a $500 million loan right before he flip-flopped on ZTE… But it also happened the same week a Chinese state-owned company came through with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, some of which will go to facilitate the construction of Trump-branded properties in Indonesia. Does anyone know what the interest rate will be on this loan? After all, it is highly unlikely that the lender has given Trump’s...

The whiplash that many observers have felt on learning of President Trump's about-face on China's ZTE telecom company from condemning it as violating US national security and violating sanctions rules by selling to North Korea and Iran has been pretty easily explained by our soon thereafter learning that China has provided a mere half a billion dollars to a project in Indonesia where Trump interests are deeply involved.  This is probably the most blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of...

Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has just published The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, which seems to be getting a major media push from a bunch of completely uncritical reviewers and commenters, some of whom really should know better.  It is not that this book is totally wrong or bad, but that it way overstates its case, cherry picking data and the views of people he has interviewed, with only the slightest of caveats.  Among those falling all over themselves to...

Folks,I have received a message from Prateek Agarwal at intelligenteconomist.com that Econospeak has again been selected as a top 100 economics blog.  We reportedly cover news items well and are not for people who do not know some economics.  We also are still in the financial sub-group.Barkley Rosser

I read with interest the article in the New York Times on the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), a cyber-salon of commentators and intellectuals who are described as fearless opponents of the politically correct thought police.  Two of their number are ex-colleagues of mine at Evergreen, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; I even co-taught a course a number of years ago with Heather.Let’s just say the article is a bit thin in the area of critical judgment and leave it at that.  I did resonate,...

On this 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s entry into the world there have been a lot of summings up.  Inspired by Brad DeLong, who posted slides from his lectures on Marx and Marxism, here are mine in the form of two Google Doc files, Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics.  They were the basis of a pair of lectures I gave last winter.  If it seems like there are way too many of them it’s because a lecture period at Evergreen can run as long as three hours.**Yes, I know students aren’t...

Air travel offers an opportunity to catch up on one’s reading.  In my case, this means Marion Fourcade’s “Economics: A View from Below”, which had been sitting in my pile for at least two long weeks.  For those wondering about her title, she has been toying for several years with the actual/mock inferiority felt by other disciplines, such as her own sociology, in the face of the pretensions, authority and worldly success of economics.This essay is another dancing, enigmatic exploration of...

Passivity is a key term in Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle: 12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. 13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the...

This is probably Donald Trump's biggest mistakes, his refusal to certify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and his fullout abrogation of it by announcing the reimposition of full economic sanctions against Iran, although we had not fully undone those sanctions anyway.  An immediate victim in the US of this action will be Boeing workers who were to benefit from a $3 billion contract Boeing had with Iran, now cancelled by order of the US government.  Needless to say,...

In celebration of Karl Marx's 200th birthday, Sandwichman is offering a $200 (Canadian) prize to the first person who answers the following two-part question:  In what passage of The Wealth of Nations did Adam Smith commit the lump-of-labor fallacy (i.e., assume a fixed amount of work to be done) and in what passage of Capital did Karl Marx disparage the assumption as dogma and prejudice? Post your answers in comments.