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from Peter Radford The key to understanding corporations is to separate the economics from everything else.  We need to do this because the economics, as expressed in various theories of the firm, are usually entirely idealized and bear no resemblance to reality.  Economists, as usual, love to theorize about things that don’t exist but which they wished did exist. But that may just be me being dismissively judgmental. Corporations, far from being products of the free market, are actually...

A Federal Court cleared the way for students who have been defrauded by for-profit institutions (I hesitate to call them schools). “This court ruling is a major victory for thousands of students across the country who were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges taking advantage of our broken student loan system. We commend Attorney General Maura Healey for her leadership fighting for students who were left with thousands of dollars in debt after...

from Lars Syll The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather self-select into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social mechanisms that in different ways aggrieve them. Wage discrimination is unacceptable....

a WEA online conference15th October to 30th November, 2018 Discussion Forum SessionsVisit the Discussion Forum I. The Financialisation of the Economy Carmelo Ferlito, “The Malaysian Property Boom and Bust Cycle: History Repeating?” Jake Jennings, “The Crisis and the Asset Driven Household” Pushpangadan Mangari, “Impact of Financialization: View from India” Teodoro Dario Togati, “Financialization and the ‘New Normal’. At the Root of the Aggregate Demand Problem Undermining New...

from David Ruccio No, the stock market is not predictable. And no one knows the exact causes of last week’s carnage on Wall Street—with the Dow down 4.2 percent, the S&P 4.1 percent and the Nasdaq 3.7 percent, representing their worst weekly performances since March. But the precipitous fall in all major indices, which many analysts blamed at least in part on the earnings blackout period, did serve to highlight one of the factors that has been driving the bull market: corporations...

WEA Commentaries Volume 8, Issue No. 4  Download the issue as a PDFIn this issue Studies on Financialization in Latin America, Esteban Pérez Socialism, Economics and the Left, David Ruccio Economics for an Information Age, Patrick Spread Complexity in Economics, Maria Alejandra Madi On global capitalism and the survival of democracy, Maria Alejandra Madi                Please support the WEA by paying a membership fee                                   or making a small donation....

Mark Weisbrot –   Presidential election is about a fight for democracy in Brazil Thomas Palley – Brazil is falling under an evil political spell

from  Maria Alejandra Madi Economic conditions are constantly changing. Today, our generation is confronted with the outcomes of contemporary globalization that is a broader, complex, and multifaceted process characterized by new markets, new actors and new rules. Indeed, globalization has produced many changes in our economy, society, culture, and politics. As a result, deep pressures to conform to new standards of behavior, such as efficiency and competitive performance, have forced...

from Lars Syll The model has more and more become the message in modern mainstream economics. Formal models are said to help achieve ‘clarity’ and ‘consistency.’ Dani Rodrik — just to take one prominent example — even​ says, in his Economics Rules, that “models make economics a science.” Economics is more than any other social science model-oriented. There are many reasons for this — the history of the discipline, having ideals coming from the natural sciences (especially physics), the...