Tag Archives: history

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Alex Tabarrok summarizes the story from the new book on RCTs, Randomistas, about how TOMS shoes invited an external evaluation of their program giving away shoes and discovered it wasn’t helping recipients very much. This isn’t that unusual in development, but faced with the evidence, they agreed to be named in the paper and be public about it, and tried to figure out how to use the insights to do better. (See study author Bruce...

[embedded content] Yanis Varoufakis – Happiness, Inc. – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #149 Jason GOTS: As the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me… Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. But under global capitalism, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to...

For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant. In 2008, the dollar's global reach...

Join economist and Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) co-founder Yanis Varoufakis for a keynote talk on the economic force that has shaped our world: globalisation. This South Bank talk is punctuated by images from acclaimed German photographer, Andreas Gursky, whose iconic photographs have documented global capital and its effects for three decades, and whose first major UK retrospective will open...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A recent literature has explored growing personal wealth inequality in countries around the world. This column explores the widening wealth gap between regions and across states in Europe. Using data going back to 1900, it shows that regional convergence ended around 1980 and the gap has been growing since then, with capital regions and declining industrial regions at the two extremes. This rise in regional inequality, combined with rising personal...

If you are a fan of Pepe Escobar.CounterpunchRome: A Eulogy Pepe Escobar

In August 2014, I wrote this post arguing that harsh austerity during the Depression caused Hitler's rise to power. At the time, my argument seemed controversial, at least in Germany. There, it is not the austerity of 1930-32 that is blamed, but the debt-driven hyperinflation of a decade earlier. Germans remain terrified of both inflation and debt to this day.I am certainly not the only person to identify a causative link between austerity and Hitler. Here is Paul Krugman slapping down...

One of the most successful ideas ever is multiculturalism. For thousands of years it has seen an endless sequence of victories. Indeed there were a lot of temporary setbacks, but the long term historic trend is unmistakable. Multiculturalism was initially thought of by kings who conquered an empire of different peoples and wanted to rule them all. These different peoples could keep their own customs and settle most of their own affairs as long as they didn't pose a threat to the social...

Yet it is very difficult to tell these other stories. History is written, we are told, by the victors and stories that do not fit the pattern narrative are rejected. This is especially the case, I have come to believe, in the United States that has created during the Cold War a formidable machinery of open and concealed propaganda. That machinery cannot be easily turned off. It cannot produce narratives that do not agree with the dominant one because no one would believe them or buy such...

It's impossible to hold back the march of time and the working out of the historical dialectic, the moments of which culminate in excess and reaction to it. Beyond Money | Devoted to the liberation of money and credit, and the restoration of the commonsThe decay of western civilization Thomas H. Greco, Jr.