Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker I have written repeatedly on how we should have been looking for a collective solution to the pandemic, where countries open-source their research and allow anyone with manufacturing capacity to produce any treatment, test, or vaccine. (We pay upfront, like with Moderna, for those wondering why anyone would do the work.) Anyhow, we obviously did not go that route under Donald Trump. Along with many others, I have argued that we should still go this route, sharing all our...

Tags: open thread

Tags: open thread

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Capital as power, differential accumulation and dominant capital According to the theory of capital as power (CasP), capitalists and corporations are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’. Their yardstick is not an unmeasurable theoretical abstraction, but the readily observable performance of others. Their aim is not to increase their ‘material gain’, counted in fictitious utils or socially necessary abstract labour time, but...

from Lars Syll Clearly, neoclassical economists believe that neoclassical microeconomic theory is theoretically coherent and provides the best explanation of economic activity; therefore there is no good reason to not teach it, if not exclusively. Many heterodox economists also broadly agree with this position, although not with all the particulars. However, sufficient evidence exists showing that as a whole neoclassical microeconomic theory is theoretically incoherent and without...

In the recent issue of INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT it is included an article authored by me and titled ‘The economic and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic’. It can be assesed, downloaded (and even listened to through the LISTEN button) via the following link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2020.1866235 Research Article The Economic and Political Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic Stavros Mavroudeas Received 11 Jun 2020, Accepted...

from Peter Radford This is a long speculation, for which I apologize, provoked by the following: “In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the...

from Dean Baker It’s fair to say that the U.S. performance in dealing with the pandemic has been disastrous. With the effort led by Donald Trump, this is not surprising. His main, if not only, concern was keeping up appearances. Preventing the spread of the pandemic, and needless death, was obviously not part of his agenda. Unfortunately, many other wealthy countries, like France, Belgium, and Sweden, have not done much better. They don’t have the excuse of having a saboteur in charge who...

Tags: open thread

Tags: open thread