Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker I know I harp a lot on all the ways we structure the market to redistribute income upward, but that’s because we keep digging in deeper on these policies, and almost no one else talks about it. I get that it’s cool to talk about all sorts of tax and transfer schemes to redistribute some of the money we give to the rich and super-rich. But, I’m one of those old-fashion sorts who thinks it’s simpler just not to give them all the money in the first place. So, now that you...

Now that much of Australia, but not Victoria, is locked down, it seems like a good time to reconsider last year’s epic lockdown in the light of subsequent experience. What have we learned that is useful? Hotel quarantine doesn’t work. Immense amounts of effort were devoted into working out who made what mistakes in setting up Melbourne quarantine, whether it was bad contracting, security guards fraternsing with the inmates returned travellers, or something else. After a dozen or...

Source

from Thomas Piketty in Le Monde The Covid crisis is forcing us to rethink the tools of redistribution and solidarity. Proposals are springing up everywhere . . . . The idea that we just have to wait for wealth to spread doesn’t make much sense: if that were the case, we would have seen it long ago. The simplest solution is a redistribution of inheritance allowing the whole population to receive a minimal inheritance, which, to fix ideas, could be of the order of 120,000 Euros (i.e. 60% of...

from Lars Syll Mainstream macroeconomics can only progress if it gets rid of the DSGE albatross around its neck. It is better to do it now than to wait for another 20 years because the question is not whether but when DSGE modeling will be discarded. DSGE modeling is a story of a death foretold … Getting rid of DSGE models is critical because the hegemonic DSGE program is crowding out alternative macro methodologies that do work … DSGE practitioners, who with a mixture of bluff and...

from Dean Baker Like most economists, I have always been a Bitcoin skeptic. The question has always been what purpose does it serve? The idea that it would be a useful alternative currency is laughable on its face. How can you have a currency that wildly fluctuates year to year and even hour to hour?  Imagine if you had a wage or rent contract written in Bitcoin. Both your pay and your rent would have more than tripled over the last year, likely leaving you unemployed and unable to pay...

from  Finance as warfare by Michael Hudson The economy is polarizing because of how the 1% use their wealth. If they invested their fortunes productively as “job creators” – as mainstream textbooks describe them as doing – there would be some logic in today’s tax favoritism and financial bailouts. Rentier elites would be doing what governments are supposed to do. Instead, today’s financial oligarchy lends out its savings to indebt the economy at large, and uses its gains to buy control...