Socialdem. 21st Century

Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman’s paper “Kaldor on Debreu: The Critique of General Equilibrium Reconsidered” (2009) makes rewarding reading.Boylan and O’Gorman review Kaldor’s work on general equilibrium in, for example, Kaldor (1972) and (1985), in which Kaldor had argued that the repudiation of Walrasian general equilibrium theory, especially as newly expounded in the models of Debreu and others (e.g., see Debreu 1959), was a precondition for any proper and truly empirical...

This much should be very clear if you have bothered to engage them at length, as was clear to me in a recent debate on Twitter. The Pro-EU left is now the TINA of the Left!These people are beyond contempt. Why can’t European states return to national political and economic sovereignty with reformed parties of the left?

He rarely criticises it, but this is surprisingly blunt:“Each time labor has been attacked—and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically destroyed—popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can happen again. It’s not going to be easy. There are institutional barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers. One big problem is that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the political system. The Democrats don’t even try to organize them anymore....

Some people on the left are screaming with horror at the rise of Donald Trump and utterly unable to explain his popularity.Well, perhaps they should look at certain bizarre sections of the regressive left infecting the universities. In its obsession with Postmodernism, extreme social constructivism, anti-racism, Postcolonialism, diversity and identity politics, we have people like this:[embedded content]This is Noel Ignatiev, a left-wing professor at Massachusetts College of Art, and...

The man was a great boxer and athlete and who would doubt it, but have people ever listened to what he actually thought about race? You listen for yourself; you decide for yourself.[embedded content]Of course what we have now is a flood of liberal and left-wing people rushing to praise Muhammad Ali while airbrushing his – umm, somewhat controversial? – opinions out of history. If only Christopher Hitchens were still alive, since he was wonderful at deflating our modern cult of celebrity and...

From Catherine Hakim’s Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking behind Calls for Further Equality (Centre for Policy Studies, London, UK, (2011):“One indicator of women’s lifestyle preferences is found in patterns of educational homogamy: whether women choose husbands with equal levels of education, or prefer a better-educated and higher-earning spouse.Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning, persists in most European...

Is it the collapse of socially-conservative religions?Just a quick survey of the specialist literature on population dynamics suggests to me that, in addition to increasing wealth, the biggest causes of falling birth rates – no matter how religious a society is – are as follows:(1) women’s education and participation in the labour force, and(2) access to birth control.Both of these factors seem to overcome most conservative religious attitudes to high birth rates. What is more, even highly...

I recently had a conversation about this, and some important points seem to emerge from looking at the data.The fertility rate (birth per 1,000 women) and birth rate per woman in the Western world started falling in the 1960s after the post-WWII baby boom.See the data for the United States here.Most notably, this largely happened before the loss of full employment and job security in the neoliberal era.But once we take a longer-run historical view, we can see that birth rates have been...

The modern regressive left would have us think so, but it’s rubbish.What about the bigotry and prejudice of non-Western cultures? The evidence is overwhelming that the non-Western world contains plenty of this.Take this actual Chinese advertisement for Qiaobi laundry detergent: [embedded content]As even the BBC noted here, the Chinese seem to have, err, – shall we say? – a bit of a problem with coloured people. But here in the West we have a regressive left that has essentially abused the...

Here are the figures from the World Bank for the two relevant periods by region:Average Per Capita GDP Growth Rates 1960–2010 Region | 1960–1980 | 1980–2010 sub-Saharan Africa | 2.0% | 0.2% Latin America and the Caribbean | 3.1% | 0.8% Middle East and North Africa | 2.5% | 1.3% East Asia and Pacific | 5.3% | 7% Developed Nations | 3.2% | 1.8% (cited in Chang 2015: 25–26). Note carefully: in every region except East Asia per capita GDP growth rates slumped under neoliberalism.There is one...