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My latest newsletter is here Opening para Labor has finally released its climate policy, which is just ambitious enough to differentiate it from Morrison’s do-nothingism. Apart from that, and process issues like the introduction of a federal version of ICAC, it seems unlikely that there will be any significant policy differences between the parties at the forthcoming election. Labor’s support for high-income tax cuts and budget “repair” means any spending initiatives will be...

I finished this article just as the Morrison government announced it was abandoning its proposal for voter ID laws. So, it ran with some hasty rewriting. Might be useful if the issue resurfaces. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

This graph shows how in the USA the share of total net worth held by the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles has decline drastically in the last two decades. https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/07/11/americas-middle-class-drastically-shrinks

from Lars Syll Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics … The implicit premise of the book is that interventions that work in one place can be expected to work in another. This presumes not only that the results of such “micro” interventions are substantially independent of the “macro” context, but also that a focus on such interventions, as opposed to those which reshape...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 29 – December 3 at Seeking Alpha My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. After a long time of very few if any weekly changes among the indicators, there were three changes this week, and several other indicators that are close to changing as well. Or, as the title to this week’s post says, there are “changes afoot.” As usual, not only will clicking over and reading bring...

from Dean Baker The development of the new variant, which was first discovered in South Africa, can be attributed to our failure to open-source our vaccines and freely transfer technology, contrary to claims from the pharmaceutical industry and its political allies. Their big talking point is that South Africa currently has more vaccines than it can effectively use at the moment. This claim ignores two important points. The first is that we really don’t know where this strain originated....

from Asad Zaman A previous post Quotes Critical of Economics collected assorted quotes which are useful in writing up different kinds of critiques of economics. In addition, I collected quotes from Romer’s Trouble With Macro which are sharply critical of economics. In terms of the “Loyalty, Voice, Exit” paradigm, I look for “Exit” quotes, which suggest that we need to throw out the entire discipline and rebuild on new foundations; for a proposed alternative, see “Uloom-ul-Umran: An...

Labor’s commitment to a 2030 target of reducing emissions by 43 per cent is a pleasant surprise. I expected 35 per cent and was confident it wouldn’t be more than 40. In essence, the 43 per cent target a restatement of the goal taken to the 2019 election. The difference is within the margin of measurement error and appears to reflect the need not to reannounce a policy that had previously been abandoned. The commitment is a surprise because it follows a series of announcements...

from Lukas Bäuerle and PNLE The most powerful and at the same time dangerous aspect of neoliberal thought is its conception of economic reality as governed by a separate sphere of absolute truths. In aligning with a long-standing tradition of perennial philosophies (lat. perennis: constant, lasting), neoliberalism has set out to reconfigure our world according to an image that was dead from the very outset. The myth neoliberalism is operating on philosophically is the idea of a world...