Public art of the day

Blu

A wealth of words

Tony Judt offers a passionate defense of words. He also expresses his contempt for both the privatizing of language (via the commodification of the internet) and “garbled language” (which, of course, represents garbled thoughts). When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we [...]

Wealth, democracy, and retirement

I’ve criticized Uwe E. Reinhardt (here and here) in recent months. But I should also give him his due: he does a good job challenging Michael Barone’s claim that the United States is a nation of property-owners. Barone attempts to make the usual conservative argument that most Americans accumulate significant amounts of wealth over the [...]

The high cost of high profits

The oil and gas industry knowingly endanger its own workers, the environment, wildlife, and communities in states across the United States—all in pursuit of high profits. The National Wildlife Federation has just issued a report, “Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit,” in which it explains that major oil spills [...]

Public art of the day

Shepard Fairey (by Carlos Mendez) at “Viva la Revolucion: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 18 July 2010-2 January 2011

Fanning the flames of white anxiety

It’s as old as the American republic: conservative elites stoking and fanning the flames of white anxiety. Time and again—during and after the Civil War, during the race riots of the 1920s, with the formation of industrial unionism, throughout the Civil Rights Movement, on down to the present—business and political elites in the United States [...]

Capitalist democracy as “organized combat”

Both mainstream economists and political scientists have failed to understand the conditions and consequences of economic inequality in the United States. In the latest issue of Politics and Society (with free access at the moment), Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson set out to analyze the “organized combat” that led to the rise of business [...]

Planning red plenty

I’ll have to find a copy of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, since the focus was the subject of my doctoral dissertation (“Optimal Planning Theory and Theories of Socialist Planning” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) and, in chapters 2 and 3 of Development and Globalization, I develop a critique of the mathematical models and social [...]

Zombie economics

Appropriately, John Quiggin’s book, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us, is schedule for publication this coming Halloween. The book is certainly interesting because of its content: The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism–the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, [...]

Economist of the day

In my view, the economy is being held back by high deficit spending and related policy uncertainties. . . the best economic stimulus would be for the government to set a clear path now to reduce the deficit and to bring down the debt in the future. John B. Taylor, “Cutting National Debt = Stimulus“