It’s all about the words . . . by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics This article was first published on Cameron Murray’s great Fresh Economic Thinking. It’s slightly revised here. Maybe I’m just dense, but when I started studying economics roughly twenty years ago, I immediately ran into a bunch of basic concepts that just didn’t make sense to me. It was mostly a problem with economists’ words. They have different,...

Michael Harrington was a great socialist in the United States. This is not to say that he did not make some political missteps, at least at Port Huron. Isserman's biography seems to have Michael making political missteps throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His son Alexander had exposure to some hard-to-understand ideas before he got to college: My older son, Alexander, began to read Dostoevsky on his own when he was about fifteen and once told a college professor who was explaining Hegel's...

Probably, and that’s bad for straightforwardly political reasons.  Arrogant, naively moralistic Justices would be much less effective. Last week the conservative court preserved access to the critical abortion drug mifepristone.  But they relied on a procedural technicality and thus preserved their ability to limit use of the drug after the upcoming election.  Refusing to reach the merits may well have been a savvy political move to limit the risk...

The revolutionary class “The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” Marx cited that statement in a footnote at the very end of the penultimate chapter of volume 1 of Capital. Without denying the plausibility of other, canonical, interpretation of the...

Kan etnisk segregation vara gynnsam? I en nyligen publicerad rapport — Goda grannar: en ESO-rapport om grannskapets betydelse för integration — visar författarna att etniskt segregerat boende inte ’per definition’ behöver vara något negativt. Detta konstaterande har fått viss uppmärksamhet i medierna och framställts som något  spännande och nytt … Vid närmare eftertanke är det dock uppenbart att ingen rimligen kan ha ifrågasatt att om man växer upp och bor...

I have following the SWI for a period of time. When I get a newspaper, it makes for some interesting read. This particular article discusses a potential meeting of ninety countries. The peace process was initiated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asking the Swiss to initiate such a conference. I can not imagine what he thought the outcome would be. Maybe it was to create the impression he and Ukraine were hoping to gain additional political...

by David Zetland The one-handed economist Humans are not doing enough mitigation to slow — let alone reverse — climate change chaos. Average global temperatures are now +1.xxC, far above the 2015 Paris Agreement’s target of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.” In this 2011...

Post-June FOMC: By Overreacting Hawkishly, the Fed Risks Being Behind the Ball by Preston Mui employ america org The simple fact as seen in a longer-run view, inflation has fallen greatly. Whether you start from its peak at 5.6% in February 2022 or 4.2% when the Fed raised rates to the current level, core PCE inflation—which is on track to deliver a 2.6% year-on-year read for May 2024—is most of the way back to 2%. The inflation...

Everything you want to know about MMT One of the positive contributions of MMT, especially from a European point of view, is that it makes it transparently clear why the euro-experiment has been such a monumental disaster. The neoliberal dream of having over-national currencies just doesn’t fit well with reality. When an economy is in a crisis, it must be possible for the state to manage and spend its own money to stabilize the economy. When the euro was...

If you look at Part 1 and Part 2 of The Demographic Outlook: 2024 to 2054 CBO projections. The estimation of Net Immigration varies anywhere from 2.7 to 3.3 million to the US in 2024. In Part 1, of CBO’s current estimates, net immigration is larger than the agency estimated last year, by 0.7 million people in 2021, 1.4 million people in 2022, 1.9 million people in 2023, 2.1 million people in 2024, 1.5 million people in 2025, and 0.7 million people in...