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from Peter Radford Let’s start with a different approach: Reality suggests there are many ways in which resources are allocated within an economy, not just one.  Economics, as it now exists in its mainstream or standard form, has withered to study just one: that which takes place in markets — where markets are strictly defined in such a way as to guarantee outcomes compatible with a certain ideological perspective.  As we have discussed before this trajectory for the discipline was deemed...

from Lars Syll According to the Swedish government official website, “Historically, the Swedish economy suffered from low growth and high inflation,” which the nation overcame with “inventive and courageous reforms” that “succeeded in maintaining control over public spending. “First, in 1996, a ceiling for public spending was introduced. This was accompanied by the addition of the ‘surplus goal’ … for the government budget.” ​Swedish government spending reforms were the consequence of a...

Amartya Sen tells Radio 4’s Today that economic inequality must be tackled GETTY IMAGES CALIFORNIA TODAY

from C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh When the third estimate of US growth in the last quarter of 2018 was released the euphoria exuded by forecasters of global growth even a few months earlier waned. The annualised quarter on quarter growth rate that had risen to a more than comfortable 4.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2018, had fallen to 3.4 and 2.2 per cent in the subsequent two quarters (Chart 1). The quarterly rates measuring growth relative to the corresponding quarter in...

Recently, there has been a burst of interest in modern money theory (MMT). The essential claim of MMT is sovereign currency issuing governments do not need taxes or bonds to finance government spending and are financially unconstrained. MMT rests on a triad of arguments concerning: (i) the macroeconomics of money financed budget deficits, (ii) the […]

from Lars Syll The ad nauseam repeated claim that our public debt is excessive and that we have to balance the public budget is nothing but absolute nonsense. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of mainstream establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed politicians and economists recommend as...

from Blair Fix, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Nowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources (Figure 1) and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than ant-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists (Fullbrook 2019). In our view, though, this conventional condemnation of the economy is somewhat misleading. As we see it, the root of our ecological...

Τετράδια Μαρξισμού Νο.9 2019   Ο παγκόσμιος καπιταλισμός εμπρός στο 2019: αναταραχές και ανησυχία   Σταύρος Μαυρουδέας Το τέλος του 2018 και η αρχή του 2019 σημαδεύθηκαν από μία σχεδόν γενικευμένη αναταραχή στις μεγάλες χρηματιστηριακές αγορές αλλά και από απαισιόδοξες προβλέψεις από όλα σχεδόν τα σημαντικά οικονομικά κέντρα της Δύσης. Ενδεικτικά, η Wall Street Journal προβλέπει «λιγότερη μεγέθυνση και περισσότερη αβεβαιότητα» ενώ το ΔΝΤ και η Παγκόσμια Τράπεζα μειώνουν τις προβλέψεις...