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from Dean Baker   It is our policy on technology that drives inequality, it is not the technology. I rarely disagree with Paul Krugman’s columns, but every now and then he does say something that I have to issue with. In a column last month, Krugman complained about the enormous costs associated with China’s zero COVID-19 policy. He tied it to its reliance on old-fashioned Chinese vaccines that used dead virus material, instead of using the mRNA vaccines developed by researchers in the...

Oreiro and de Paula’s (2022) reply to my article (Palley, 2021) further convinces me that New Developmentalism (ND) substantially misconstrues the development challenge and ND’s policy recommendations lean in a Neoliberal direction. The critique of ND is not its emphasis of the importance of manufacturing. It is the regressive inclination, the narrowness of policy recommendations, […]

from David Ruccio It’s not price gouging, corporations tell us—it’s inflation. You know, supply and demand. Not enough supply, because of forces beyond their control, and too much demand, but they’re doing the best they can to meet it. Not a word about profits, though. Not from the corporations. And not from mainstream economists and pundits (or, for that matter, from the Biden administration, which prefers to point the finger at Putin). When they do go beyond supply and demand, they...

While Russian billionaires have been the focus of attention due to the ongoing fighting in Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions against Russian individuals and entities, their counterparts in the United States have accumulated an additional $1.7 trillion of net worth since the start of the pandemic two years ago. This marks an increase of 57 percent compared to March 2020 data from Forbes aggregated by U.S.-based organization Americans For Tax Fairness (ATF). As our chart shows, four of the...

from Lars Syll Although the expected utility theory is obviously both theoretically and descriptively inadequate, colleagues and microeconomics textbook writers all over the world gladly continue to use it, as though its deficiencies were unknown or unheard of. Daniel Kahneman writes — in Thinking, Fast and Slow — that expected utility theory is seriously flawed since it doesn’t take into consideration the basic fact that people’s choices are influenced by changes in their wealth. Where...

A quick response to the latest IPCC report on climate change, published as Time’s up: why Australia has to quit stalling and wean itself off fossil fuels Because of tight deadlines, the editor added a fair bit of material to my draft. I stand by all the content, but not all the language is mine. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Fernando García-Quero and Fernando López Castellano and RWER current issue Overconfidence in the magical thinking of technification, economic growth, the free market, and neoliberal globalization has led many to forget that the state is the main policy architect and actor when facing a crisis. Successful responses to Covid-19 have shown, once again, the central role of states in organizing political measures that foster and maintain the welfare of their populations, through actions...