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That’s the actual title of a recent book (2015) by Robert E. Babe, who has a doctorate in economics and is professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. The sub-title is Media, Power, and Democracy. Harold Innis you know. If you don’t, get with the required reading. Noam Chomsky everybody knows. So who is Wilbur Schramm? He’s the founder of Communication Studies in the U.S., which is your ordinary flourishing discipline, behavioral, quantitative,...

from Trond Andresen, Steve Keen and Marco Cattaneo and the current issue of WEA Commentaries A new means of payment can be part of the solution for the eurozone’s unemployed. We have now seen nine years of social crisis and huge unemployment in many euro countries. An entire youth generation has barely experienced anything but being out of work. Still no solution has been found or implemented. The time is overdue to think outside the box. We propose a solution that has circulated...

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism they are...

from W. Milberg and the current issue of the RWER With the Trump tax cuts of 2017, the disconnect in popular discourse between government spending and taxing became more or less complete. Rate (and revenue) cuts were considered politically appealing, independent of any imagined social goal that might require public financing. It constituted an end to the debate over the government spending required to attain social goals and the analysis of the tax rates and regulations needed to finance...

I was recently asked to comment on the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund, which has largely dropped from sight since its apparent primary purpose, channelling public money to the Adani mine project, was vetoed by the Queensland government. Here’s my response The NAIF is a failed political solution to a non-problem, harking back to the developmentalist ideology of the mid-20th century.. It reflects an outdated view of Northern Australia as a largely homogenous, underdeveloped...

from Peter Radford and the current issue of RWER There is a continuum between the abstraction of economics theory and the practice of business. The two, after all, coexist in the same domain. The one seeks to explain phenomena which are consequences of the other. In the past few decades the highly stylized version of the firm that exists in economic theory has deeply influenced the way in which business is practiced. This is despite the detail excluded in theory, and the evident...

The idea of a “Green New Deal” seems to be everywhere, quite suddenly, although Wikipedia suggests it has been around for quite a while and that the phrase was coined by the ubiquitous Tom Friedman. There’s quite a good summary of the various versions by David Roberts at Vox (for those who don’t know him, an excellent source on climate issues in general). The fuzziness of the term is, in a sense, unsurprising. It seems obvious that any progressive policy for the US must fit this...