Economists' Climate Change Misconceptions Exposed

Uncovering the Flawed Financial System

1.0 Introduction I have written many posts on formal results related to my favorite interpretations of the theory of value and distribution in Marx's Capital. But Marx's work is not solely about formalism. One aspect of volume 1 is a history of production processes up to Marx's day. Much opportunity exists to build on this history. Some have done this in works I have not read much of. I have been reading Soren Mau, and many years ago I read much of Charles Babbage's On the Economy of...

by Steve Hutkins Save the Post Office AB: I have been involved in multiple, many, etc. systems implementations over the years. They need careful upfront planning with users to understand what may work best and have a foundation in mind before you move forward with an implementation. PG Louis DeJoy has never worked in a post office and lacks a foundation to support his belief the plan “he” is implementing will work. Furthermore, he has not...

Kevin Drum has a timely post on grocery inflation. Overall, it’s at 1% now.“Why do so many people still think inflation is high? It’s because they don’t respond to averages. They respond to outliers.”*snip*“Frozen juice is up 27%. Baby food is up 9%. Ground beef is up 6%. When you shop for groceries, these things are going to stand out.“Now, it’s also true that eggs are down 17%. Apples are down 10%. Fruits, vegetables, chicken, and dozens of other...

There has always been a lot of misinformation and frank dishonesty surrounding Social Security. Here are three things that Social Security isn’t:1. A retirement investment. Social Security is insurance. It is not meant to be your sole source of income after retirement (although for many Americans, it basically is). Social Security is not a substitute for a pension or 401k, or for personal savings. But if some calamity befalls you and you lose your...

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 – by New Deal democrat “it should be no surprise that Biden’s poll numbers have recently improved.” No big economic news today, so let me update a correlation with information from last Friday’s personal income data. To wit, is consumer sentiment about the economy tied to any real metric? With a lot of noise, it does appear to be correlated. The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment for over half a century. The last...

Today, I am fully engaged in work commitments and so we have a guest blogger in the guise of Professor Scott Baum from Griffith University, who has been one of my regular research colleagues over a long period of time. He indicated that he would like to contribute occasionally and that provides some diversity of voice although the focus remains on advancing our understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its applications. Today he is going to talk about what responsible government...

The turn away from expansion, production and trade toward lending and speculation has precipitated decline for centuriesIn the vein of Michael Hudson on the transition from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism, and the implications of this transition systemically. The article is a summary of the work of Giovanni Arrighi, one of a number of economists, economic sociologist and economic anthropologists that have explored the phenomenon of capitalism and its development in terms of the...