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from John Komlos – http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue97/Komlos97.pdf A good economy would not have 150,000 deaths of despair a year with life expectancy declining even before Covid (Figure 7) (Case and Deaton, 2020). When traditional social structures of support dissolved for working class whites there was nothing to take their place and despair accumulated. The family was gone, the unions were gone, neighborly love was gone, the churches were no longer relevant, the government looked...

from Lars Syll The defeat and suppression of the classical perspective — with its evolutionary, institutionalist, and developmental descendants — cleared the way for a dogmatic economics that exalted self-regulating competitive markets … As we have seen, this perspective soon ran into serious — but temporary — difficulties with the Great Depression, mass unemployment, and the rise of Keynes, whose theory is revived in Harvard University economist Stephen A. Marglin’s Raising Keynes …...

from Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson  As a new Cold War against China began, it was clear that the pandemic was altering the international balance of power fundamentally. For former US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, it was likely a “hinge of history”: “[i]f the 21st century turns out to be an Asian century as the 20th was an American one, the pandemic may well be remembered as the turning point”. It would erase 9/11 and 2008 from memory and rank alongside “the 1914 assassination...

from Lars Syll One of the limitations with economics is the restricted possibility to perform experiments, forcing it to mainly rely on observational studies for knowledge of real-world economies. But still — the idea of performing laboratory experiments holds a firm grip of our wish to discover (causal) relationships between economic ‘variables.’If we only could isolate and manipulate variables in controlled environments, we would probably find ourselves in a situation where we with...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan This note contextualizes the ongoing U.S. policy shift toward greater ‘regulation’ of large corporations. Cory Doctorow (2021) and Blair Fix (2021) are optimistic about this shift. We doubt it. The Limits of Power Large U.S.-based corporations are extremely powerful, but the growth of their power has decelerated considerably. Figure 1, updated from our ‘Corporate Power and the Future of U.S. Capitalism’ (Bichler and Nitzan 2021), shows the...

We[1] are often urged to “get out of our bubbles” and engage with a wider range of viewpoints. This mostly turns out to be a waste of time. As I experienced from my side, engagement with the political right consists mainly of responding to a string of talking points and whataboutery, with little if any content. On the rare occasions these discussions have been useful, it’s typically because the other party in the discussion is on the verge of breaking with the right[2] To restate...

from Peter Radford My summer of research is almost over.  The season here in Vermont is changing and the view from our window will soon be dominated by the brilliant autumnal colors our region is famous for.  All is both regular and well. Sort of. Perhaps there’s something in the water down there in New York.  There are rumblings of life in economics.  The long sclerosis inhibiting the emergence of theories that explain rather than re-invent reality might just be close to loosening its...