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from David Ricardo You don’t have to read Marx to understand the lack of power workers have under capitalism. But you do have to read beyond mainstream economists and economic pundits. You might turn, for example, to the business school. Yes, I know, that’s a strange assertion. But let me explain. The usual argument these days is that workers have acquired a lot more power because of the scarcity of labor. When labor is scarce (basically, when the quantity supplied of labor is less than...

It has been a relatively low key federal election campaign so far, with a surprising amount of convergence on some key issues by the major parties. As a bit of blip, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau pledged on August 25 that a returning Liberal government would raise the corporate tax rate on the profits on all banks and life insurance companies, profits in excess of $1 billion. Further, these fin institution would pay a fee over a four-year period, a “Canada recovery dividend”....

from Peter Radford So who is in charge?  Who controls the flow of technology?  Is it us?  Or does the technology now control us? We live in a technology infused world.  Our current civilization sits on a foundation accumulated through the past few centuries and built of machine power.  We cannot separate ourselves from this cumulative support system without regressing to a pre-industrial way of life.  Which is something few of us either want or are equipped to deal with.  We have...

from Lars Syll But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for certain. This does not mean that they were dealing with a system in which change was ruled out, or even one in which the disappointment of expectation was ruled out. But at any given time facts and expectations were assumed to be given in a definite and calculable form; and...

Yesterday I appeared on the Bullhouse podcast with Kenna for a very interesting discussion about a wide range of financial and economic topics. We discussed a number of different topics. Some of these were as follows: Whether there is a property bubble in the US and internationally right now.The potential bubble in the junk bond market and its implications.Why the risks in the market for rental properties are idiosyncratic this time around.How real estate is now a financial...

In the last piece on detecting housing market bubbles, I an through some of the problems with using standard-scoring. Here I will provide two solutions; one complex, the other simple. But before we move forward with this, we must understand one other problem when it comes to determining whether a housing bubble is indeed a housing bubble. This problem is not, like standard-scoring, related to how we manipulate the data. Rather it is related to how we define a housing bubble itself....

In a recent piece in Newsweek that got some attention, I made the case that the United States is currently experiencing a housing bubble. The next logical question is obvious: are other countries? After all, the 2008 meltdown was a global crisis; the US was not alone in its housing bubble. In order to try to detect housing bubbles ideally we would like some sort of systematic framework that we can deploy. The problems with using this approach when it comes to hosuing bubbles,...

from Dean Baker That may sound pretty crazy, but that’s roughly what the minimum wage in the United States would be today if it had kept pace with productivity growth since its value peaked in 1968. And, having the minimum wage track productivity growth is not a crazy idea. The national minimum wage did in fact keep pace with productivity growth for the first 30 years after a national minimum wage first came into existence in 1938. Furthermore, a minimum wage that grew in step with the...