from Peter Radford You can’t fight a war without understanding your enemy. That’s an adage as old as war itself. Which means it’s very old. Joe Stiglitz doesn’t understand his enemy. Now, that’s an odd thing to say bout someone who’s worldview is hardly a secret. Stiglitz has given it his best shot for decades. He’s one of the few big name economists worth reading on a regular basis. But that doesn’t mean he always says things that add up. He’s a roll lately and his latest book is...
Read More »Economics — a dismal and harmful science
from Lars Syll It’s hard not to agree with DeMartino’s critique of mainstream economics — an unethical, irresponsible, and harmful kind of science where models and procedures become ends in themselves, without consideration of their lack of explanatory value as regards real-world phenomena. Many mainstream economists working in the field of economic theory think that their task is to give us analytical truths. That is great — from a mathematical and formal logical point of view. In...
Read More »Το ψηφοδέλτιο της ΑΝΤΑΡΣΥΑ-Ανατρεπτική Συνεργασία στις ευρωεκλογές
Το ψηφοδέλτιο της ΑΝΤΑΡΣΥΑ-Ανατρεπτική Συνεργασία στις ευρωεκλογές έχει ως εξής: Αγγελόπουλος Ιωάννης Σοσιαλιστικό Εργατικό Κόμμα Πάτρα Αναστασιάδης Αναστάσιος (Τάσος) Συντονισμός Εργατικής Αντίστασης Ασλανίδη Παρθένα (Θένια) γιατρός στο Αττικό νοσοκομείο, Συντονιστικό Νοσοκομείων Βαφειάδου Ελένη δημοτική σύμβουλος Περιστερίου, μέλος Δ.Σ. αρχιτεκτόνων Ν. Αττικής και αντιπροσωπείας ΤΕΕ, στέλεχος ΕΚΚΕ Βουρεκάς Κωνσταντίνος αρχιτέκτονας, πρόεδρος τμήματος Αττικής...
Read More »Real-world economists take note!
Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds
Read More »Water Flowing Upwards: Net financial flows from developing countries
from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh Once again, low and middle income countries (LMICs) are at the brutal receiving end of the fickle trajectory of international capital flows. As Figure 1 indicates, net financial flows to such countries, which increased rapidly after the Global Financial Crisis that began and was created by advanced economies, peaked in 2014. Thereafter, they have been on a downward trend, which has accelerated dramatically from 2021, to the point that they turned...
Read More »Machines and tools
It’s International Workers Day, still celebrated as the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, at least when the Labor party is in office. So, it’s a good day for me to set out some tentative thoughts on work and its future. Via Matt McManus, I found this quote from Marx ‘Fragment on Machines”. The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital -posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated Reading this, it struck...
Read More »An economic analysis of presidential immunity
At Thursday’s Supreme Court hearing on Trump’s immunity claim, Justice Alito worried that prosecuting former presidents would create an incentive for incumbent presidents to subvert democracy to remain in office and avoid prosecution (Transcript, p. 110-11): JUSTICE ALITO: All right. Let me end –end with just a question about what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society, which is something that we all want. I’m sure you...
Read More »Protesting Now and in the Sixties and Seventies
You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by...
Read More »The non-existence of economic laws
from Lars Syll In mainstream economics, there’s — still — a lot of talk about ‘economic laws.’ The crux of these laws — and regularities — that allegedly exist in economics, is that they only hold ceteris paribus. That fundamentally means that these laws/regularities only hold when the right conditions are at hand for giving rise to them. Unfortunately, from an empirical point of view, those conditions are only at hand in artificially closed nomological models purposely designed to give...
Read More »The war to end war, still going on
Anzac Day (the anniversary of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915) is always a sad day, but even more so this year, with the horrors unfolding before us in Gaza. The carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French, of which the Gallipoli campaign was part is the direct cause of the current catastrophe. As well as grabbing colonial possessions for themselves, the Allies made promises to Jews (seeking a homeland) and Arabs (seeking independence from Turkey) which could...
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