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from Dean Baker From my Twitter feed it seems that Sarah Palin has been resurrected. All sorts of centrist-liberal types are yelling “drill baby, drill!” as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have been pushing for ignoring environmental regulations and even directly subsidizing fracking. While that is no doubt music to the ears of the fossil fuel industry, this is going backwards about as quickly as we can in our effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is an...

In the university, we need to open up and reorganize our antiquated departmental structures to recognize what’s been happening outside traditional economics departments.   Well before “neoliberalism’s” ascent in the 1970s, mid-century academic economics had largely purged their departmental curriculum of cross-disciplinary topics that it had inherited from 19th and early 20th century “political economy”: for example, the close study of legal systems, social relations and institutions,...

from Lars Syll MMTists often like to position themselves as the only ones to properly understand the ‘operational realities’ of modern monetary systems. Ironically, many of the claims made by MMTists on this topic are misleading at best. One common rhetorical tactic that I’ve noticed they employ, which often catches their critics out, is to use the term ‘government’ in a way that’s different typically from how it is used in mainstream economics. When they say ‘government’, they tend to...

from Dean Baker The General Picture: Policy Was Structured to Redistribute Upward I don’t agree with much about Ross Douthat’s politics, but he often makes some interesting points. He did so in his latest column on the Canadian “truckers” protest against vaccine mandates. Douthat argues that support for the protest stems from resentment by people who do various types of manual labor against the professional class. His point is that the latter have largely been setting the rules in ways...

from Ken Zimmerman (originally a comment) Nixon initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that continues to this day by ending US commitment to the international gold standard. The immediate effect of Nixon’s unlinking the dollar was to cause the price of gold to skyrocket; it hit a peak of $600 an ounce in 1980. This of course had the effect of causing U.S. gold reserves to increase dramatically in value. The value of the dollar, as denominated in gold, plummeted. The result was a...

from Lars Syll And then there’s Paul Krugman who … has stumbled on folk economics. And I’ll give him credit, since the “folk” he refers to “needn’t be members of the working class. They can be, and often are, members of the elite: plutocrats, powerful politicians and influential pundits.” Absolutely! … But then he reverts to classic Krugman: mainstream economists get it mostly right, and all they really need is the “IS-LM model” to analyze economic crises (such as the 2007-08 crash) and...

Bloomberg News reports an outbreak in Kentucky and Virginia after initial outbreak discovered at Indiana facility last week. Avian flu is nothing new, and as we continue to keep large quantities of poultry in ever increasing numbers in concentrated operations around the poultry processors, the occurrences are likely to become more severe and often. This is mostly because commercial poultry operations look like this: The amount of birds grown...