Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh For quite some time, China was seen as a ‘threat’ by virtue of being a global manufacturing hub, embedding knowledge in production and riding on its cheap labour force and large volumes of foreign investment, to win a disproportionate share of global markets. But more recent declarations from official Western sources focus on the threat stemming either from China’s illegal appropriation or theft of intellectual property, or knowledge for...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

from Steve Keen and RWER current issue Steve: Yes, the financialisation of higher education has gone hand in hand with the growth of bureaucracy. More than all of the money raised from student loans has gone into the black hole of administration, so despite the increase in funding, there is less money going to education now than when universities were fully funded by the state. This has also perverted the educational process, for both administrators and students. Whereas administrators...

Tags: open thread

from Lars Syll There seems to be a pervasive human aversion to uncertainty, and one way to reduce feelings of uncertainty is to invest faith in deduction as a sufficient guide to truth. Unfortunately, such faith is as logically unjustified as any religious creed, since a deduction produces certainty about the real world only when its assumptions about the real world are certain … Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to...

from Asad Zaman 1         GENERALIZATIONS FROM EUROPEAN HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE? Introduction: Briefly, we can state the puzzle as: “Why does Social Science claim to be UNIVERSAL, when it is based on analysis of European historical experience?”. Many authors have recognized this problem, which manifests itself in many ways. For example, Timothy Mitchell (2002) writes: “The possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a...

from Dean Baker Since I came to Washington in 1992, I have been working alongside friends in the policy community, labor movement, and community organizations in fighting against a series of trade pacts. NAFTA was the immediate issue in 1992, but a couple of years later we had the Uruguay Round of the GATT that created the WTO. At the end of the Clinton administration, we had China’s admission to the WTO and then various other smaller pacts. Those of us who opposed these deals (which were...

Tags: open thread

As I’ve mentioned previously, when I started work on Economic Consequences of the Pandemic, I assumed I’d be writing a polemic against austerity, as I did in Zombie Economics. Based on the last crisis, it seemed likely that any stimulus measures would be wound back rapidly, leading to a sluggish and limited recovery. That’s pretty much what is happening in Australia, where I live, but not in the US, where the book will be published. On the contrary, Biden’s policies are pretty much...