Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit is an essential read not just for anyone interested in racism, housing segregation and post-Civil Rights era racial politics, but for anyone interested in understanding the American economy. It is impossible to understand contracts, property deeds, government guarantees, homeowner’s associations, or lending without knowing how each of these building blocks of the market can be used for race-based exploitation.
It is Wednesday so some snippets and some music – sad music this week because it signals the death of one of the great pioneers of Jamaican music last week. I am holding a Mini-Music Festival today – right here on my blog. Join in an celebrate a legend. But a few economics matters first …
We have a big problem with the way the media reports on the national debt. It’s unclear if they don’t understand how federal debt works, if they intentionally write about it in the scariest way possible, or some combination of the two. Let’s start with a passage recently published by NPR: “The pandemic is taking …
Taxation does not need to be the bitter salve taken with every spoonful of sugar—it is and always has been a way to provide for the general welfare.
Robert C. Hockett and Saule T. Omarova propose in the white paper listed below that the United States government create a ‘National Investment Authority’ as an intermediate agency between the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury. Its function would be to mobilize capital from both the public and private sectors to benefit the general …
“Lawfare” is a word few Americans understand, but people in many other countries have bitter experience with the pathology. The word means waging war on democracy by perverting the law into a weapon to against your political opponents.
Steve Keen, UCL While climate scientists warn that climate change could be catastrophic, economists such as 2018 Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus assert that it will be nowhere near as damaging. In a 2018 paper published after he was awarded the prize, Nordhaus claimed that 3°C of warming would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, …
Nobel prize-winning economics of climate change is misleading and dangerous – here’s why Read More »
The African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty initiative began almost three years ago in preparation for the first conference on The Quest for Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa, which was held in Tunis (November 6-9, 2019). An edited volume from the conference will be published by Pluto Press (2021), and a second edition of the conference will take …
Abstract Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine, compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; …
The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change Read More »