Tuesday , March 19 2024
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Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Weekend read – The trouble with words

from Peter Radford Words are not ideas.  They are our means to capture ideas and make them tangible.  The problem is that words are a porous net that inevitably lets some accuracy slip away, but sometimes captures irrelevant detail that shines brightly in the moment and then dulls in the light of later thought. Trying to define something so a discussion can follow without ambiguity in meaning sliding in and muddying things.  Slippery isn’t it? How about this: “I sometimes wish we could...

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In a free market, drugs are cheap, government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive

from Dean Baker This simple point was left out of a Washington Post article on the legal battle surrounding the Biden Administration’s efforts to negotiate lower prices for drugs purchased by Medicare. This point is important because the drug companies are definitely not trying to get the government out of the market, as the industry claims. The industry is effectively insisting that the government is obligated to give it an unrestricted monopoly for the period of its patent duration....

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I heard there’s some good shit on TV tonight …

from Lars Syll Time is a scarce resource on television. However, if one still — as is so often the case nowadays — uses precious airtime for trivial matters and meaningless ‘entertainment,’ there must be a reason. Television is — still — for a large part of the population one of the primary sources of information and worldview. Thus, filling program schedules with trivialities becomes an effective means to — instead of functioning as an instrument for shaping opinions and fostering...

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Is “greedflation” over?

from Dean Baker Peter Coy used his column yesterday to beg President Biden not to use the term “greedflation” to explain the runup in inflation since the pandemic. I am sympathetic to much of his argument, most importantly, the idea that corporations suddenly turned greedy is a bit far out. As Coy notes, corporations are always greedy. The real question is whether something unusual was going on with corporate profits in the pandemic. There clearly was an increase in profit margins in the...

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From micro to macro, Andrew Leigh’s accessible history covers the economic essentials: My review from The Conversation

Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries. It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode. The...

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Old

In a few days time, I’ll be lining up in the 65-69 category for the Mooloolaba Olympic triathlon (1500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run)[1]. People in this age category are commonly described as “aging”, “older”, “seniors”, “elders” and, worst of all, “elderly” (though this mostly kicks in at 70). The one thing we are never called is “old”. But this is the only term that makes any sense. Everyone is aging, one year at a time, and a toddler is older than a baby. Senior and elder are...

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Why and how economics must change

from Jayati Ghosh Economics needs greater humility, a better sense of history, and more diversity The need for drastic change in the economics discipline has never been so urgent. Humanity faces existential crises, with planetary health and environmental challenges becoming major concerns. The global economy was already limping and fragile before the pandemic; the subsequent recovery has exposed deep and worsening inequalities not just in incomes and assets but in access to basic human...

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“Κοινωνική Ασφάλιση – Συνταξιοδοτικό & Αμοιβές της εργασίας στο Δημόσιο” – Ρέθυμνο 11/3/2024

Εκδήλωση Κοινωνικού Πολύκεντρου ΑΔΕΔΥ στο Ρέθυμνο “Κοινωνική Ασφάλιση – Συνταξιοδοτικό & Αμοιβές της εργασίας στο Δημόσιο” Το Κοινωνικό Πολύκεντρο σε συνεργασία με την ΑΔΕΔΥ και το Νομαρχιακό Τμήμα ΑΔΕΔΥ Ρεθύμνου συνδιοργανώνουν εκδήλωση στο Ρέθυμνο με θέμα «Κοινωνική Ασφάλιση – Συνταξιοδοτικό & Αμοιβές της εργασίας στο Δημόσιο»τη Δευτέρα 11 Μαρτίου στις 18:00 στο Επιμελητήριο Ρεθύμνου (Εμμ. Πορτάλιου 23).  Το θέμα θα αναπτύξουν ο κ. Στ. Μαυρουδέας, Καθηγητής του...

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“The Political Economy of COVID-19”

 New book from WEA Books At the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 and the lockdown practices imposed worldwide generated a global economic crisis that challenges the traditional explanations of economic downturns .  Like the economic crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was systemic and global, and this collection of essays examines it in a broad geographical and historical context. Kindle $6.00                  Paperback $14.99Amazon US   UK   FR  DE   IN ...

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Utility theory — explaining everything and nothing

from Lars Syll Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference functions so that they are “other-regarding”. But even with these modified...

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