Socialdem. 21st Century

The free banker Larry White has a recent post here on the origins of coined money:Larry White, “Why the ‘State Theory of Money’ doesn’t explain the Coinage of Precious Metals,” Alt-M Ideas for an Alternative Monetary Future, August 24, 2017.White is essentially talking about the origins of coined money in ancient Lydia and Greece.First of all, there are some points in White’s article that may be freely acknowledged as correct, as follows:(1) Chartalism does not have a universal theory of the...

James Keir Hardie (15 August 1856–26 September 1915) was the founder of the British Labour Party (which was founded on 27 February, 1900), its first leader, and its first Member of Parliament.In 1899, James Keir Hardie appeared before the UK House of Commons Select Committee on emigration and immigration. He – as a leading socialist of Britain – gave his opinion on mass immigration into Scotland:“James Keir Hardie, Secretary to the Ayrshire Miners’ Union and to the Scottish Parliamentary...

Lecture 6 of six lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen. The sixth lecture below is about a theory of value for a new political economy:[embedded content]

Lecture 5 of six lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen. The fifth lecture below is about making economics consistent with thermodynamics:[embedded content]

Lecture 4 of six lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen. The fourth lecture below is a discussion of modelling Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis:[embedded content]

Lecture 3 of six lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen. The third lecture below deals with Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis:[embedded content]

An interesting interview of Sam Bowles (Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) by Marshall Auerback on the Neoclassical myth of homo economicus:[embedded content]A great interview.See also his book: Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton University Press, Oxford and Princeton, NJ.

Lecture 2 of seven lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen, dealing with bank originated money and debt:[embedded content]

The first of seven lectures given to the Exploring Economics Summer School in Erfurt, Germany, by Steve Keen, dealing with role of money in a monetary economy:[embedded content]

Breitbart has an eyebrow-raising article here on early American socialists and their attitudes to race.There are two points here.First of all, it is true enough that many early socialists, Liberals and even some Marxists did believe in the biological reality of race and racial differences. We know that Karl Marx at the end of his life seems to have believed in the reality of races, and even in a kind of racial phrenology and the racial pseudo-science of Pierre Trémaux (1818–1895) on racial...