With the death of Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, a chapter in European history has ended. The time has come to take critical stock of this decisive period and to draw lessons for the future, a few months ahead of the European elections of June 2024. To say that the Europe we know today was shaped during this period would be an understatement, with the 1986 Single European Act (allowing for the free movement of goods and services), the 1988 European...

The Review of of Keynesian Economics is co-sponsoring the Fifth Conference on Demand-led Growth in Rio, next July 11 and 12.2024 marks the 45th anniversary of Thirlwall’s classic 1979 paper that introduced Thirlwall’s law as well as the 75th anniversary of Prebisch’s manifesto on the main development problems of Latin America. These seminal works were key, for post-Keynesian and structuralist literatures, to put the balance of payments constraint at the center and as one of the main problems...

Debt's Impact on Economy & Happiness

from Clive Spash and Clíodhna Ryan and RWER issue 106 Economics fails not merely to account for biophysical limits to growth but to account for actual and potential alternative provisioning systems. Instead, talk of ‘the economy’ makes an implicit ontological claim that there is only a singular form of modern economy: the capital accumulating, price-making market economy. Economics has then become limited to a discussion of market capitalism and how it can be maintained in light of its...

I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed.Real history resists simplification, but to simplify, the seemingly permanent division of communist East and capitalist West succumbed to the...

What to make of the Soviet Union? Apparently, the description of it as state capitalism goes back to Lenin. Djilas description of it as such is central to his best-known book: "Abstract logic would iпdicate tћat tће Communist reyolution, when it achieves, under different conditions and Ьу state compulsioп, the same things achieved Ьу industrial revolutions and capitalism in the West, is nothing but а form of state-capitalist revolution. The relationships which are created Ьу its victory...

Some morning economics in the states trying to rein in costs. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves takes on a cut back on food for kids by not accepting a fully funded program. Tate looks like he could spare a few pounds except . . . Republican Governor Tate Reeves is declining to participate in the federal program giving electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to low-income families to supplement food costs for children when academic classes are...

As taken from “In ‘wild western Licking County,’ rogue builders meeting permit enforcers bent on upholding laws,” msn.com, as written by Alan Miller. The Angry Bear writer has added his own experiences to the article. There are modifications to the original article. With the rapid pace of growth in western Licking County, some commercial builders and business owners have taken the law into their own hands by moving ahead with construction projects...

Are RCTs — really — the best way to establish causality? The best method is always the one that yields the most convincing and relevant answers in the context at hand. We all have our preferred methods that we think are underused. My own personal favorites are cross-tabulations and graphs that stay close to the data; the hard work lies in deciding what to put into them and how to process the data to learn something that we did not know before, or that...

Texas took it upon themselves to guard the border and not allow the Border Patrol entry to Shelby Park, a 47-acre Texas public park. The Border Patrol typically apprehends people crossing the river at that point. Texas/US military soldiers were sent to the area to block any migrants from crossing the river. A group of six had trouble crossing the river. One woman and two children drown in the presence of the National Guard. The Border Patrol was...