Naked Keynesianism

This is my short response, originally posted here, to William I. Robinson's post here and Fred Magdoff's note in the comment section of that post:While I generally agree with Robinson's and Magdoff's analyses, what is absent, specifically with respect to Robinson's discussion, is a concrete assessment of the acute variables that measure the degree to which national States have the capacity to engage in power-maximizing behavior and, thus, pursue certain responses, i.e. imperialism, to the...

By Lance TaylorPresident Trump, in his inaugural address and elsewhere, rightly says that over the decades since 1980 American household distributions of income and wealth became strikingly unequal. But if recent budget and legislative proposals from Trump and the House of Representatives come into effect, today’s distributional mess would become visibly worse.First, I will sketch how the mess happened, then I will propose some ideas about how it might be cleaned up. I will show that...

Updated program below. I'll be discussing the history of central banks. This is parallel to the HES conference.

New ebook downloadable for free, titled Dialogues on Development, that was co-edited by Ingrid Kvangraven of the Developing Economics blog, has been published (h/t David Fields of URPE blog). These are interviews on dependency theory with Samir Amin, Patrick Bond, Miguel Angel Centeno, Peter Evans, Ramón Grosfoguel, among many others.My interview, that starts in page 86, begins with this question: To start with the most basic question, what is dependency theory?  There is no...

[embedded content] On the non existent infrastructure plan. I am a bit surprised that Trump cannot deliver on some of the basic promises of his supposedly populist campaign. He stopped TPP, and will derail new free trade agreements, but the GOP is so dysfunctional right now that they cannot pass a budget with a significant increase in infrastructure spending, to generate job growth. Btw, the defeat of Theresa May in the UK signals, at least to me, that left-wing populism, of the...

I've seen this graph in an interesting book by Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things; highly recommend, btw) on how the big internet firms Google and Facebook essentially (but also Amazon) have become the new monopolies of our gilded age. He discusses mostly the effects on the entertainment business, but the implications are far-reaching of course. Below the share of fiber optics connections as a share of total broadband connections in OECD countries (Taplin uses this graph in the...

By Thomas I. PalleyDonald Trump’s first one hundred days have revealed his inclination for unilateralism in international relations. That inclination reflects his opportunistic and bullying disposition, and it also fits well with his anti-globalization pose.Trump’s unilateralism has also spawned a dangerous waltz with Washington’s neocon establishment. The opportunistic Trump looks to gain establishment support, while the neocon establishment looks to the opportunist-in-chief to implement...

[embedded content]Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Robots. The gist is that technological change is not the problem. Employment is pro-cyclical and pro-structural, for lack of a better word, it goes with the cycle and with the trend. The issue is the weakness of the working class bargaining power. We need regulation of corporate oligopolies, stronger unions, and a political system willing to require and fund social welfare. In that world, robots are not the...

Or that is what the recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Report by Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens says. Their study is essentially a critique of a recent study by Acemoglu and a co-author that suggests that robotization would have a large effect on employment generation. Note that this is not a requirement in mainstream neoclassical (marginalist) theory. Actually, technological progress should generate higher real wages and higher employment in the conventional model of the labor market...

[embedded content] My interview with Rick this week. I should say that I'm quite skeptical that impeachment will actually take place. In part, because Trump is not a real populist, and will not deliver for the working class people in the Rust Belt that voted for him. But he will, probably, pass several things that Republicans want, and that might provide the support that would shield him from political disaster. Share Get link Twitter Google+