Public art of the day

Hope Cemetery, Barre, Vermont

End of Economics and Policy Studies

That’s it. Today is the last day for the Department of Economics and Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Tomorrow, ECOP will be officially shut down. For those who are not familiar with the history, here’s a little recap: ECOP started as a Department of Economics open to alternative perspectives in 1975, when [...]

Misery loves company

And boy is there a lot of company these days. . . According to the latest Pew Research Center survey, “The Great Recession at 30 Months,” over half of the U.S. population has taken a direct hit from the capitalist crises: More than half (55%) of all adults in the labor force say that since [...]

Mind the gap

For those (like Paul Krugman) who are floundering around trying to understand whether or not there’s a link between inequality and capitalist crises, the similarities between 2007 and the situation just before the Great Depression couldn’t be clearer. The latest study by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the gap between the [...]

Unemployment’s silver lining

There’s a silver lining to the current levels of unemployment—for capitalism. Steve Matthews, for Bloomberg, argues that long-term unemployment is good for business. It leads to increases in productivity and lower inflation, and thus higher profits. The 6.8 million Americans out of work for 27 weeks or longer — a record 46 percent of all [...]

The corporate university

Follow the money. It’s the best way to see the emergence of the corporate university. First, there’s the tyranny of student evaluations, which as Stanley Fish explains are “all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance”: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with [...]

Blogging economics

They’re at it again, telling noneconomists to just shut up and listen—to “real” economists. That’s the message Kartik Athreya has for all those people out there who have the audacity to produce and disseminate ideas about economic issues and events without having a Ph.D. in economics. They should just stop their “sophmoric musings” and let [...]

Krugman’s missing link

Paul Krugman needs some help. He can’t quite figure out what the links are between inequality and capitalist crises. Let’s start by giving him credit: he actually believes that inequality matters (unlike most mainstream economists who largely ignore or explain away issues of economic inequality, now as in the past). And he does seem to [...]

Self-defense?

In this insane country of ours, we no longer have the right to self-defense against guns. That’s the opinion of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court in the case of McDonald v. Chicago. On their interpretation, we have the individual right to form armed militias but not the right to control the use of guns that [...]

Cartoon of the day