Tag Archives: ideology

Democratic voters comprise a multiracial but predominantly white group of college graduates and a larger group of non-college voters. The non-college share of the Democratic coalition is split about 50:50 between white (of which non-college whites are such a large share of the American population that they accounted for fully one-third of Joe Biden’s voters, despite voting overwhelmingly for Trump) and non-white individuals. It is overall much less liberal on a range of issues, especially...

The United States is not only in the grips of a COVID-19 crisis that threatens to derail the economy and potentially take millions of lives. It is also suffering from a president who is deeply suspicious of expertise and of governance generally.... In my view, the second sentence should read, "Americans that are deeply suspicious of expertise and of governance generally elected a president that shares this view. Blaming government policy on the president rather than the political process is...

The assumption of isolated individuals transacting in free markets has underpinned highly damaging economic policies since the 1980s. Given the interdependent nature of the digital world, economic researchers need to ditch their unscientific attachment to this paradigm and instead focus on the economy of the 2020s. The 2020s will be the decade when the idea that economic problems can be “left to the market” to solve is finally put to rest – after some 40 years during which that belief has...

"The University [of Chicago] is the best investment I ever made in my life." -- John D. Rockefeller Follow the money. Thoughts On EconomicsSome People Who Have Shaped EconomicsRobert Vienneau

My fundamental understanding of the world has been warped by a now challenged approach. I'm not alone.… In the end, the chief byproduct of my general education exposure was a kind of indoctrination into the centrality of markets to understanding human behavior and the apparent importance of economics professors. I’m not alone. Introductory economics could be one of the most widely received credits in all of higher education. And unlike other common courses (like say, first-year writing),...

Being an atheist or agnostic doesn't necessarily imply that one is a naturalist.Open CultureAtheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows Josh Jones

Analysis from the left mostly about British politics but inclusive of all aspects of neoliberalism as the policy, strategy and tactics of elite power. Says "long read," but it is not that long. Worth a read even if you are not British since it is also an analysis of elite power as it relates to national politics and neoliberal globalization. Let's hope Cook is correct in seeing the wave cresting. The question then becomes will the breaking of the wave result in world war as the elite...

One of the Anonymati [Anonymouses? Anonymice?] asks that I write a critique of the oh so sober, serious analysis of socialism, complete with charts and graphs, produced by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors....I have read the Executive Summary of the report and scanned through the report itself, but I do not intend to take issue with it, and my reason for not doing so is the real subject of this post. Let me begin by reminding you that Karl Marx, who wrote 5000 pages, more or...

This post deals with a set of ideas that I find appealing, but contradictory. I know I do not fully understand many of them. Perhaps somebody who understands more can either agree with me that there are contradictions here or point to some way of resolving them. This post is also more about current events than is typical of my posts.... Not actually about Fox News but rather on the use of analytic concepts in human science — psychology, sociology and political science, and by extension...

Although this sounds extremely harsh, it is the only way to describe aspects of DSGE macro such as the assumption that the level of interest rates is a key determinant of economic behaviour. In practice, this assumption is built into all mainstream models, and the empirical methodologies have no way of rejecting the assumption. It is not entirely an accident that the consensus has been shocked by the slow pace of recovery after modern recessions -- after all, it was believed that the level...