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“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Eighty-seven years ago those were the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural speech. Today, they resonate with Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, which confronts a barrage of attack aimed at frightening away voters. Fear is the enemy of change and the friend […]

      Source: Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power In 2005, Microsoft’s market value was 2,583% greater than that of General Motors. Mainstream economists would say that Microsoft therefore had more property than GM. But more of what? Nitzan and Bichler point out that when we look under the hood of market value, there’s nothing ‘real’ to back it up. Microsoft, for instance, has only 18% as many employees as GM. And it owns only 3% as much equipment (in dollar terms). So is this a...

from Asad Zaman From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians, statesmen, and poets. However the rise of empiricist and positivist thinking marginalized the role of rhetoric in 20th Century university education. Julie Reuben in “The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality” writes about this change as follows: “In the late...

from Lars Syll Everybody who takes regression analysis course, studies the assumptions of regression model. But nobody knows why, because after reading about the axioms, they are rarely mentioned. But the assumptions are important, because if any one assumption is wrong, the regression is not valid, and the interpretations can be completely wrong. In order to have a valid regression model, you must have right regressors, the right functional form, all the regressors must be exogenous,...

At the Munich Security Conference the U.S. and its allies had no idea of how to handle China, a problem of their greed and stupidity. The West is divided, confused. What to do about Huawei? Really, what to do with China? So when Mike Pompeo…proclaimed…”we are winning,” the largely European audience was silent and worried in what sense “we” existed longer. In the meantime, Europe, including the U.K, finds itself in a mincer between the U.S. and China...

from Joachim H. Spangenberg and Lia Polotzek and WEA Commentaries  In recent WEA Commentaries, the issue of complexity theory and its implications for economics have rightfully gained some prominence. However, while the authors picked up some relevant points, the issue deserves a more comprehensive treatment in new economics, beyond mobilising some arguments to bolster ongoing debates. It should be recognised instead that complexity requires a different way of thinking, and of asking...

from Dean Baker Last month George Soros had a New York Times column arguing that Mark Zuckerberg should not be running Facebook. (Does the NYT reserve space on its opinion page for billionaires?) The gist of Soros’ piece is that Zuckerberg has made a deal with Trump. He will allow all manner of outrageous lies to be spread on Facebook to benefit Trump’s re-election campaign. In exchange, Trump will defend Zuckerberg from efforts to regulate Facebook. Soros is of course right. Zuckerberg...

Despite protestations to the contrary, the Gods are not interested in any of its proclaimed stakeholders, be it labor, the environment, or climate change. As they did in 2007, they still sing the same old tired tunes, blindly pursuing profits at the expense of the health of the globe and of its citizens. In the World Economic Forum of 2007, Professor Klaus Schwab, proudly announced: “In today’s increasingly interconnected and complex world….Climate...