Tag Archives: Political Economy

The Trump Administration’s 2021 budget calls for major new cuts in programs funded through non-defense appropriations. This budget category, often called non-defense discretionary (NDD), supports veterans’ medical care, aid to education, environmental protection, low-income housing, scientific research, infrastructure, public health, national parks, justice and law enforcement, job training, and many other important services and investments.[1]"THE BUDGET ABANDONS THE BIPARTISAN AGREEMENT...

There is an old saying “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.” That saying is relevant for the current healthcare debate in which former Vice-President Biden and elite Democrats are touting a reheated version of Obamacare with a public option. It is a case of trying to fool the American […]

As part of my recent European speaking engagements, I went to Rome on February 5, 2020 to speak at the Italian Senate on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the dysfunctional state of the European Union. The next day I had long discussions with one of my co-authors, Thomas Fazi, who I wrote – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017) with. We have been working on the sequel to that book for some time, and, in the...

Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a brokered convention. The party’s candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor Class trump the voting...

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Eighty-seven years ago those were the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural speech. Today, they resonate with Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, which confronts a barrage of attack aimed at frightening away voters. Fear is the enemy of change and the friend […]

Politicians often tell us that we should live within our means. Quite right. Unfortunately, many of them do not appear to understand what this actually entails when it comes to fiscal policy. So far as most economists are concerned, the events of the last decade have thoroughly discredited advocates of austerity. Yet, it remains quite common to hear politicians from across the political spectrum calling for reductions in fiscal deficits or even fiscal surpluses. There appears to be little...

Thomas I. Palley, Esteban Pérez Caldentey, and Matias Vernengo, Review of Keynesian Economics, January 2020. Professor Robert Rowthorn delivered the second annual Godley-Tobin lecture in New York City on March 1, 2019. The title of his lecture was “Keynesian economics: back from the dead?” and it is published in this issue of the Review of […]

One of the dominant themes of the last century was this general assumption that human activities can be studied through an ever increasingly rational lens. That may be, but economists then went too far: they projected rationality into the subject of study. Instead of using the tools of reason to tease out regularities of interest, they made the subject matter itself entirely rational. So the regularities they thought they saw were simply echoes, or mirrors, of their own thought...

The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm. For four decades the US economy […]

As 2019 (already) comes to an end, I rounded up the top 10 most-read posts of the year on the Economic Sociology and Political Economy community blog. You are welcome to (re)read and share them. And, let’s try something new, this list are followed by the 10 least-read posts of the year which are surely worth reading....  Economic Sociology and Political EconomyTop 10 Most-read Economic Sociology and Political Economy Posts of 2019Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE,...