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from David Ruccio Mainstream economists continue to insist that workers benefit from economic growth, because wages rise with productivity. Here’s the argument as explained by Donald J. Boudreaux and Liya Palagashvili: Firms cannot afford a misalignment of their workers’ pay and productivity increases—the employees will move to other firms eager to hire these now more productive workers. Higher economy-wide productivity, after all, means that workers add more to the bottom lines of...

from Dean Baker We know the way Republicans win elections these days. They call their opponents offensive names. This is probably a good political tactic. After all, when your party’s agenda is about redistributing as much money as possible to the very richest people in the country, you are not likely to win much support based on your policies. Therefore, we get name-calling. The latest bad word in the Republicans’ schoolyard taunts is “socialism.” President Trump and his team have...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The short leading indicators have sunk to a level that is consistent with an oncoming recession in the next 3 – 8 months.  But the recent government shutdown may still be skewing some of the data. As always, not only is clicking and reading hopefully informative for you, but it also helps reward me a little bit for the effort I...

from Lars Syll Krugman complains that Lerner was too “cavalier” in his discussion of monetary policy since he called for the interest rate to be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment” without saying exactly what that rate should be. It’s an odd critique, since Krugman himself subscribes to the idea that monetary policy should target an invisible “neutral rate,” a so-called r-star that exists when the economy is neither depressed nor overheating. For what...

from Dean Baker An average family participating in the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program costs taxpayers $400 a month. We pay $126 a month to the typical beneficiary of food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). By contrast, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, costs us $44,200 a month. This figure may catch some readers by surprise, because they probably don’t think of themselves as paying the...

Federal Government last night released an independent interim assessment of the recent fish deaths. The report is damning, but you wouldn’t know that reading the press release from the relevant minister, David Littleproud. Here’s my response, which I provided to the Australian Science Media Centre The Report clearly describes the “antecedent conditions” which made the Lower Darling so vulnerable to large-scale fish deaths, all of which reflect policy failures of the current...

from Maria Alejandra Madi In the introductory note to the book Trade and Market, Polanyi invites the readers to re-examine the notion of the “economy” since many people think that the only way of organizing the livelihoods of men is the market economy. In his own words: ‘What is to be done, though, when it appears that some economies have operated on altogether different principles, showing a widespread use of money, and far-flung trading activities, yet no evidence of markets or gain...

from Lars Syll The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts …​ He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He...