Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Here is the campaign speech Harris delivered in Wisconsin.  It’s good:  short, to the point, and upbeat.  She hits on the right issues:  Trump is a criminal, abortion, economic opportunity, Republicans cannot be trusted with Social Security and Medicare, etc. A patriotic framing that emphasizes that the United States is a great country could help present this bill of particulars in a compelling way.  The basic message would be “Yes, we have our...

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old. First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are...

from Lars Syll The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts.  In society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole is more than a sum of parts. This fact shows up when orthodox/mainstream/neoclassical economics tries to argue for the existence of The Law of Demand – when the...

President Joe Biden ends his 2024 reelection bid after weeks of pressure from Democrats to drop out, PBS News No doubt the moneyed influence played an important part in his leaving the race. Much of this has to do with future plans of addressing tax breaks. More on this part later. Tags: Joe Biden ...

I’ve written another piece on the uneconomics of nuclear power in Australia The big unanswered question about nuclear power in Australia is how much it would cost. The handful of plants completed recently in the US and Europe have run way over time and over budget, but perhaps such failures can be avoided. On the other hand, the relatively successful Barakah project in the United Arab Emirates was undertaken in conditions that aren’t comparable to a democratic high-wage country like...

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog In this sequence of posts, I will present the contents of the video podcast entitled “Michael Hudson: Why the US has a unique place in the history of imperialism? ” For me, Hudson’s book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of the American Empire was an amazing eye-opener, essential reading for anyone who want to understand modern real world economics. The podcast provides a summary of his ideas, and these posts break it down further to make it...

The new UK government is signaling some reasonably ambitious reforms on the labour policy front (certainly more ambitious than most were expecting, given the Labour Party’s austere pre-election rhetoric and platform). They call the vision a New Deal for Working People . The policy framework is called A Plan to Make Work Pay. Broad features of the plan were mapped out in the King’s Speech (akin to our Speech from the Throne in Canada) delivered yesterday, and include: Strengthening...

What to do when we can’t trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at. I spoke last weekend at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the (LNP held) electorate of McPherson. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election. It was a great discussion....

from Lars Syll ZEIT: Today, the debate focuses on the labor shortages facing many industrialized countries. Angus Deaton: I am always cautious when people talk about a scarcity of labor but don’t talk about wages. The argument always is: Americans don’t want to do these jobs, Germans don’t want to do these jobs. So we have to have migrants. But in many cases, it is not that Germans or Americans don’t want to do these jobs, but that they don’t want to do them at the wages we can pay...