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from C. P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh Capitalism is supposed to be all about economic growth, through the dynamism that is created by competition. This growth is meant to be driven by investment (or accumulation) which in turn is used to justify the shares of national income that are delivered to private profits, to the owners of capital. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” famously said a certain Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital more than 150 years ago. It...

Recently I have been looking at whether inflation might be in the pipeline. The jury is still out on that, but caution would be wise given the current situation. That leads to a rather obvious question: what should investors do during an inflation? First off, if we are to be naive stock investors, how much does inflation impact stock market returns? We can see the impact in the following chart. But this chart simply does not capture the pain investors feel during proper...

from Lars Syll That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting — indeed, it is under obligation to do so — from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form. But for reason to enter on the sure path of science is, of course, much more difficult, since it has to deal not with itself alone but also with objects. Logic,...

from Edward Fullbrook Over the weekend I read two articles (1, 2) in The Guardian about market-value.  One concerned the painter Bansky, the other a truffle hunter in Croatia. I’ve been fan of Bansky for twenty years, beginning when he was a local graffiti artist in my part of town.  A couple of years ago one of his paintings, Girl With Balloon, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London for £1.1m.  As soon as the auctioneer’s hammer fell, Bansky’s canvass “passed through a secret shredder...

I appeared on the Bullhouse podcast again to discuss some of the recent work I have done on inflation. I also talk about how the impact of COVID19 and the policy responses to it risk resulting in major labour shortages and a return to a 1970s-style inflationary regime. Podcast: Inflation and Labour Shortages

from Blair Fix Over the last year, I’ve watched with horror and amusement as health agencies around the world flip-flopped their advice on how to deal with COVID. My horror comes from knowing this flip-flopping breeds mistrust in science. But I am (morbidly) amused because I know that uncertainty is a basic part of real research. For the public, ‘science’ tends to mean authoritative knowledge. But for researchers, ‘science’ is an iterative process, filled with wrong turns, new evidence,...

… It depends on how you frame the question That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation . The key idea, drawn from behavioral economics and psychology is that of framing, developed by Kahneman and Tversky. More to come on this soon … Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Mark Weisbrot Labor Day is a good time to reflect upon how American workers have been doing — especially the majority who have been left behind for most of the past 40 years. From 1979 to 2018, the median wage has grown by just 11.6 percent. If we compare this to prior decades, e.g., 1948 to 1979, that increase was 93.2 percent. These two facts tell a big part of the story of a social transformation that is both inexcusable and historically unusual: a high-income country becoming...