Shocking Differences Between Modern Capitalism

Just over a century ago, in the spring of 1924, the German left launched an uphill battle to redistribute the wealth of the Hohenzollerns, the ruling family who had lost power with the abdication of Wilhelm II and the creation of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Rich in lessons for today, this little-known episode deserves to be remembered. It illustrates the ability of elites to use the language of the law to perpetuate their privileges, regardless of the scale of their wealth or the...

To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study reports that deep learning algorithms can distinguish which cancers will, and which won’t, metastasize to the brain based...

Publications Solving the UK’s skills shortage How a National Skilling Wage would future-proof our economy By Alex Chapman, Chaitanya Kumar, Paulo Yunda 19 March 2024 Download the report...

 – by New Deal democrat at the Bonddad Blog Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser makes the point that the yield curve is still inverted, and has not yet eclipsed the longest previous time between onset of such an inversion and a recession. So he believes the threat of recession is still on the table. And he’s correct about the yield curve, although it is getting very long in the tooth. In the past half century, the shortest time between a 10...

I have received several E-mails over the last few weeks that suggest that the economics discipline is finally changing course to redress the major flaws in the curricula that is taught around the world and that perhaps Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) can take some credit for some of that. There has been a tendency for some time for those who are attracted to MMT to become somewhat celebratory, even to the point of declaring ‘victory’. This tendency is not limited to the MMT public who comment...

The Lost Peace by Robert Skidelsky February 2024As the Ukrainian war enters its third year, there has been renewed, if rather limp, talk of a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The premise is that since neither side can ‘win’, it makes sense to start making peace. Few now remember that the war almost ended before it got going. On 24 February 2022, Russia launched ground and air attacks on Ukraine on four fronts. On 28th February 2022, Russian and Ukrainian officials came together to...

The Left's Taboo: Debt Cancellation

Noah Smith has a blog post arguing that AI won’t take away all the jobs from humans. It’s a clever and well-written post that deserves your attention.Here are some money grafs:“So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will eventually force us to make hard choices about where to allocate AI’s awesome power. We will have to decide where to apply our limited amount of AI, and...

Uncovering the Inflation-Money Value Link