by Tom Walker Econospeak Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.3  Inversion Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value, reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and making the performance of...

What they all think is going to happen, won’t. The opposite will.

 I blink, you lose! Will Rogers supposedly said that he was not a member of any organized political party. He completed that noting he was a Democrat. That feeling is alive and well among Dems. The confusion caused by Biden's withdrawal seems to have led to many peculiar views among pundits and public intellectuals. Two typical reactions are the ones that are certain that Biden would have lost, and now with Kamala the election is in the bag, and the ones that suggest that the lefties in the...

from Lars Syll The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts.  In society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole is more than a sum of parts. This fact shows up when orthodox/mainstream/neoclassical economics tries to argue for the existence of The Law of Demand – when the...

The mainstream belief is that deregulated markets lead to economic prosperity. This is wrong. The 2007 housing crisis is a glaring example. Unregulated mortgage lending led to excessive debt, causing a financial meltdown. Instead, we need to regulate mortgage lending to prevent such excesses. When banks lend irresponsibly, they inflate housing bubbles. These bubbles burst, leaving ordinary people in financial ruin. Regulation can curb this destructive cycle. Another common...

Morning . . . One other factor I believe you may have missed (too many factors). The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not pay for itself over the last 10 years. Just a small matter of it passing using Reconciliation which insists it pay for itself (being redundant here). The repeal of it impacts those in the upper 10% (or more) of the taxpayers and more so the 1 percenter who make up a million (taxpayers) or slightly more taxpayers having income...

 – by New Deal democrat Over the weekend Harvard econ professor Jason Furman suggested that the Fed funds rate is not very restrictive: “As inflation has come down the real Federal funds rate has risen and is now the most restrictive it has been this cycle, a point that Austin Goolsbee has emphasized a number of times . . . That is not the way I would look at it. The rates that matter for the economy are long rates. and expected inflation...

Kevin Drum pushes back on the WSJ claim that household debt is a problem in America, and Kevin brings the receipts:“. . . debt as a percent of disposable income . . . is currently lower than it was at the end of 2019 (9.8% vs. 10%).“. . . household debt as a percent of GDP . . . went up during the pandemic and then back down. It is currently lower than it was at the end of 2019 (76.2% vs. 77.7%).“Total credit card balances today are precisely the same...

Progressives and social democrats should be fighting them tooth and nail, not blithely embracing them. by Steve Roth Originally Posted at Wealth Economics The spreadsheet behind the tables and graphs here is available on request. Drop me a line in the comments or elsewhere. Following the community of Socks (🧦s) or “social democrats” out there on the interwebs (this is definitely my economic tribe), in articles, and in books, there’s a...

Testing Oceanic Carbon Capture I’ve mentioned previously the hypothesis that iron fertilization of the ocean and consequent phytoplankton blooms is one feasible method to achieve global carbon capture. Small-scale experiments have been done already. The results have been mixed insofar as documenting the scale of phytoplankton blooms, but there has been no reported harm.Another strategy relies on chemical sequestration of atmospheric CO2 through...