Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio It should perhaps come as no surprise that, as capitalism has been called into question and socialism generated increasing interest during the past decade, capitalism’s defenders have resorted to a long historical view. Look, they say, how capitalist growth has decreased poverty and led to improvements in people’s lives around the globe. Just stick with it and all will eventually be well.  That’s why, as Jason Hickel points out, the above infographic, based on...

from Lars Syll In this post-rationalist age of ours, more and more books are written in symbolic languages, and it becomes more and more difficult to see why: what it is all about, and why it should be necessary, or advantageous, to allow oneself to be bored by volumes of symbolic trivialities. It almost seems as if the symbolism were becoming a value in itself, to be revered for its sublime ‘exactness’: a new expression of the old quest for certainty, a new symbolic ritual, a new...

One of the tenets of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that taxes are, ceteris paribus, deflationary. When prices of gasoline increase because of green taxes, people have less money left and know that their purchasing power declines. This is not consistent with neoclassical macro, at least not in its influential ‘Ricardian equivalence’ version, but that’s not interesting. The interesting thing is that MMT states that if inflation rises, taxes should increase to cool the economy. Which...

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Source: International Labour Organization The most popular post on this blog is a summary of ‘The Great Transformation‘ by Polanyi. Which is remarkable as it is an old book about even older events: the transformation off traditional economies with a low rate of investment and little wage labor into modern economies with a high rate of investment and high levels of wage labor (Polanyi does not stress investments too much but see, in about the same period, Kuznets (1955) and Rostow...

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STREAM: SPOTIFY: bit.ly/sweetnothingsonspotify APPLE MUSIC: bit.ly/sweetnothingsonapple FOLLOW: www.instagram.com/eliotdeanbaker www.facebook.com/eliotdeanbaker www.eliotdeanbaker.com Directed by Eliot Dean Baker Produced by Kate Rancka Cinematography by Alec Ploof Coloring & Editing by Hunter Brumfield Starring Mykhayla Thirkill THANK YOU: Michel'le Baptiste Sofia Bak Andrew Burrill

from Peter Radford The following is part of a correspondence I had recently with a friend here in Vermont: The purpose of increasing taxes on the wealthy is twofold: one is to raise revenue; the other is to prevent growing concentration of wealth.  I think the second of the two is the more important.  The American system of opportunity and so on was founded on society being more equal than it is [not equal, but more equal].  As wealth gets entrenched further each decade inequality erodes...

from David Ruccio   How else to put it? The levels of economic inequality in the United States are obscene.  According to the latest data from the World Inequality Database, the share of pre-tax income captured by the top 1 percent of Americans is an astounding 20.1 percent, while the bottom 50 percent are forced to make due with only 12.6 percent. And the distribution of wealth is even more unequal: the top 1 percent own 37.2 percent but the bottom 50 percent of Americans hold no net...