Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

I am mainly linking to this fairly important article by Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Diamond quotes many people arguing that the US really should do more to get everyone in the world who is willing to take the vaccine vaccinated. I am going to move on quickly to how this could be done, because I think it is obvious that it should be done. I think I will try to get a few silly things out of the way. What about other rich countries ? Is it...

Oil rebounds on Omicron optimism; SPR at another 18 1/2 year low as sales to Asian refiners begin, Focus of Fracking, RJS Not really much news this week; gasoline & distillate inventories continue to rebound from the lows, no big moves on prices or much else; the headline is almost contrived . . . the “sales to Asian refiners” came from an oil blogger who said we sold SPR oil to China and India. That information hasn’t been released...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource IX — Disposable time as a model for environmental governance Not only could disposable time be regarded as a common-pool resource similar to other common-pool resources, but it could stand as the single most far-reaching and democratically vital model of a common-pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded to something in this vein when he noted that, “Human labor is also the primary constituent of the society...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VIII — An ecological subject In “Foundations for Environmental Political Economy,” John Dryzek explored the prospects of an environmentalist economic subject, “Homo ecologicus,” as an alternative to the traditional rational actor or economic man. Dryzek criticized previous efforts at positing an ethical, environmentalist subject, saying they were flawed by wishful thinking and reductionism. The alternative...

Real average and aggregate wages continue decline in November; a sharp deceleration in the consumer sector now appears likely As you may already know, consumer prices increased 0.8% in November. In the past two months, there has been a re-acceleration in CPI, with the monthly numbers equal to earlier this year and the worst since the Great Recession:  On a YoY basis, consumer inflation is now the highest since the big Reagan recession...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VII — Common-pool property rights Two key features of Ostrom’s analysis: the distinguishing of a spectrum of separable property rights rather than monolithic “ownership” and the use of a grid that classifies goods according to how difficult it is to restrict access to them and the extent to which one person’s use of a good subtracts from what is left available for others. Schlager and Ostrom identified a...

The Great Resignation and jobless claims Initial and continuing jobless claims continue at or near their best levels in the past half-century. Initial claims declined 43,000 to 184,000, a new 50 year low, while the 4 week average declined 21,250 to 218,750, also a new pandemic low, and in the past 50 years only bettered by the period from late 2018 until February 2020: For all intents and purposes, nobody is getting laid off....

October JOLTS report: at least the jobs market isn’t getting any worse in disequilibrium The JOLTS report for October was released this morning. While it did not indicate any significant progress towards a new labor equilibrium, at least the trends did not get any more destabilized. Job openings (blue in the graph below) increased to 11.033 million, which remains below the July peak of 11.098 million. Voluntary quits (the “great resignation,”...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource V — Social costs and common-pool resources  The basic idea behind common-pool resources also has a venerable place in the history of classical political economy and neoclassical economic thought. In the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, Henry Sidgwick observed that “private enterprise may sometimes be socially uneconomical because the undertaker is able to appropriate not less but more...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VI — Withholding labour Superficially, it might seem that the individual worker can deny access to an employer offering unsuitable terms. But it is here we need to factor in that peculiarity of labour-power noted by the silk weaver, William Longson, that a day’s labour not sold on the day it is offered is “lost to the labourer and to the whole community.” “If his capacity for labour remains unsold,” Marx...