Socialdem. 21st Century

Once again TheIllusionist has written a thought-provoking comment about the cultural left and neoliberalism:“Here’s an interesting something that I’ve been talking about with people recently: maybe the cultural left is actually PART OF neoliberalism.I started thinking this after the Brexit debate. I hang around in London finance circles and what struck me was that the exact same rhetoric that was being used by the cultural left types on my Facebook feed was being used by the finance people....

In one respect, it’s true there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy about welfare from big business, since wasteful corporate welfare is pervasive in our societies. On the other hand, some aspects of business welfare are actually sensible and justifiable, even in a social democratic nation. E.g., agricultural protectionism.It is well known that you simply cannot have a productive, stable agricultural sector in a true free market, because wild and violent swings in the prices of commodities destroy...

Actually lots of issues discussed as well:[embedded content]I’m on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2

Friends, do you self-identify as leftist, but find yourself answering “yes” to many of these questions?: (1) do you think left-wing politics is fundamentally about good economics? Do you think we need full employment, Keynesian macroeconomic management of our economies, a high wage economy, and an end to offshoring of our manufacturing and service jobs to the Third World by treasonous corporations and neoliberal governments?(2) are you a Bernie Bro who loved Bernie’s economic policies but...

Well, partially, anyway.Just look at Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity on – WTF?? – Fox News partially steal the Left’s agenda on economics, as they talk about the poisonous disaster of free trade, outsourcing, loss of manufacturing, the decline of the middle class, and mass unemployment in America. Just listen to Pat Buchanan praise Bernie and Ralph Nader at the end![embedded content]The world has turned upside down. This is why we need a reformed left, friends.I’m on Twitter: Lord Keynes...

Thomas I. Palley gives a lecture on Post Keynesian economics below, a talk which he gave at the FMM Conference, The Spectre of Stagnation? Europe in the World Economy, in October 2015 in Berlin.[embedded content]

Good fun. The comments on Singapore are also very interesting.[embedded content]

So once again Europeans have seen another vicious, grotesque terrorist attack in the heart of Europe. Even one picture here speaks a thousand words about this monstrous horror.[embedded content]See here and here. If things go on like this, it seems France may well face a permanent state of emergency. If it gets much worse, it will be more like low level civil war in a major European country. As Europe descends into chaos, even millennial cultural leftists and other regressive left lunatics...

TheIllusionist recently wrote this interesting analysis of millennial cultural leftists and the current political situation in the comments section, as follows:“LK,I fear that the identity stuff will actually proliferate more and more [sc. amongst millennial cultural leftists]. It probably won’t take over the economic radicalisation that is occurring. I think that will stay. But it will greatly impair their ability to govern. They will hold fast to fringe causes that will alienate the rest...

See here.Amongst the graphs is this one here:[embedded content]As we can see, the really significant fall in the birth rate in Western nations like Germany and Britain happened from c. 1875 to the early 1920s.This was long before the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s. So what caused the fall from the late 19th century?