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I have no expertise in this field. This post will not be cluttered with links, because I will write from memory and not link to anything. I suppose in a way, this post is a slap in the face of Tom Nichols, who is a subset of the topic, is supposed to be an expert on the topic, and is the author of “The Death of Expertise“. I will attempt to explain how his errors are due to envy and neurosis. Honestly, my trigger was lest nasty (and less based on...

Or at least think about how you will talk about them in January . . . It now seems likely that Joe Biden will win the presidency, and there is a reasonable chance that Democrats will capture the Senate as well.  If they do get unified control of the government, climate policy will high on their legislative agenda.  What is unclear is whether their approach will include a carbon tax.  This is troubling, because carbon taxes have very substantial economic...

from Norbert Häring According to its own description, the World Economic Forum is “THE international organisation for public-private cooperation” and has as its main objective “to improve the state of the world”. The foundation, founded in 1971 by German economist Klaus Schwab, lacks neither power nor self-confidence. For years now, almost all the world’s major heads of government have made the pilgrimage to the annual meeting in Davos to pay their respects to multinational corporations...

from Peter Radford It seems appropriate to mention increasing returns today.  After all, this is the day on which several of our modern titans of industry are appearing before Congress to respond to the concerns raised by the gargantuan size that their respective businesses have grown to become.  The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are all under the gun to defend the enormous clout that each wields in the modern marketplace.  Today is the culmination of a long investigation by...

Ever since I wrote Work for All with John Langmore back in 1994, I’ve been pushing the idea that a path to full employment requires an expansion of publicly provided services. For about the same length of time, Bill Mitchell has been putting forward similar (but not identical) proposals. At some point in this process, Bill became one of the advocates of what’s called Modern Monetary Theory, which makes the point that taxes don’t (directly) “fund” public expenditure. Rather, they ensure...

from Dean Baker The saving rate hit a record 25.7 percent level in the first quarter, indicating that few of the pandemic checks were spent The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank at a record 32.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter. While almost all the major categories of GDP fell sharply, a 43.5 percent drop in consumption of services was the largest factor, accounting for 22.9 percentage points of the drop in the quarter. Nonresidential fixed investment also fell sharply,...

In a post today at Econlib, David Henderson writes: Postscript: There was an unusually high percentage of good comments on my op/ed on the WSJ site. Here’s one I just noticed: In Michigan, our Governor ordered auto insurance companies to issue rebates – due to folks driving less I guess. But amazingly, our Governor who is owned by the teachers union, gave no such order  to rebate the portion of property taxes that go toward public schools. Even though...

from David Ruccio Capitalism’s crises are clearly becoming deeper and more severe. After the crash of 2007-08, the United States (and much of the rest of the world) was subjected to the Second Great Depression, the worst economic downturn since the depression of the 1930s. Now, in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, business activity has ground to a halt and unemployment has soared to levels reminiscent of the first Great Depression. Not surprisingly, both Main Street and Wall...

from Lars Syll In a word, Economics is an Impossible Science because by its own definition the determining conditions of the economy are not economic: they are “exogenous.” Supposedly a science of things, it is by definition without substance, being rather a mode of behavior: the application of scarce means to alternative ends so as to achieve the greatest possible satisfaction—neither means, ends, nor satisfaction substantially specified. Exogenous, however, is the culture, all those...