Tag Archives: power

Collapse, ma non troppo!New IDEAS Working Paper on the alternative views of the collapse of Bretton Woods. From the abstract:Contrary to conventional views which suggest that the collapse of Bretton Woods represented the beginning of the end of the global hegemonic position of the dollar, the collapse of the system liberated American policy from convertibility to gold, and imposed a global fiat system still dominated by the floating dollar. The end of Bretton Woods and the set of regulations...

By Sunanda Sen (guest blogger)The recent uprising and protests, in a large number of the White-settled countries in connection with the murder of an unarmed Black-American, George Floyd by a White policeman on duty in Minneapolis has re-opened pages of history relating to unequal power , with state- sanction of White supremacy over ‘others’ having a subordinate status. As history unfolds it, the over-powered included the slaves acquired from Africa, the indentured labour shipped from...

What we knew already. The perps accuse others of doing what they themselves are doing or have done. The power game. When I was a young man, one of my mentors told me, "You need to study power." He went on to say that power is endemic, and the only ones that actually understand it are those that use it. It's sort of like playing poker. If you don't know who the mark is, you are. IrrussianalityExposing the disinformation industry Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public...

In this post we discuss debt in the current context, and consider where the very high levels of debt will take us. And as importantly, who wins and who loses. Transcript is available for download.... Digital Financial Analytics BlogDebt And Power – With Michael Hudson Martin North

I had a mentor who emphasized the necessity to understand power. At first I didn't quite know what he was talking about. Subsequently, I discovered that he was correct. For example, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite was a real eyeopener.Counterpunch How We Stay Blind to the Story of Power Jonathan Cook

What has confused economists for centuries is that they’ve focused on what’s inside the fence of property rights, not the fence itself. And who can blame them? Historically, the things that were owned were easy to see. In contrast, the act of ownership — the institutional fence of private property — was abstract. And so economists tied wealth to property, not the property-rights fence.… In reality, wealth had always been non-material — a social relation of exclusion. The digital revolution...

After decades of rightwing dominance, a transatlantic movement of leftwing economists is building a practical alternative to neoliberalism.... The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy… The new economists’ enormously ambitious project means transforming the relationship between capitalism and the state; between workers and employers; between the local and...

Must -read. This places economic power front and center and shows how without addressing social, political, and economic the result of captialism is neo-feudalism.Surprisingly, or may not so much, Yves Smith leaves out a major contribution of the universal employment guarantee by government, in which government guarantees to match a job with a person who is otherwise idle and wants to work. This removes the onerous aspect of capitalism that uses unemployment to discipline labor through the...

Does the solution to widening economic inequality lie in a wealth tax? We speak to Emmanuel Saez, an adviser to Elizabeth Warren who helped design the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” plan. Half-hour podcast.Project SyndicateHow to Tax the Super Rich Emmanuel Saez and Elmira Bayrasli

How should we measure inequality? There are two metrics that economists use: relative and absolute. In the past I have argued that the relative metric – which is by far the dominant approach, embodied in the standard Gini index, in the famous “elephant graph”, and inlogarithmic distribution graphs – is problematic in that it is aligned with the interests and perspectives of the rich, and effectively obscures real inequalities in the distribution of new income around the world. From the...