Right-wing hypocrisy

Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have uncovered a particularly egregious example of right-wing hypocrisy: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement [...]

Black Swan baseball?

Here’s a question for those of you who have been following the debate concerning Nassim Taleb’s theory of improbable outcomes: is the result of the American League East battle for the final playoff spot (which the Boston Red Sox lost and the Tampa Bay Rays won, with the last pitch in the ninth inning) an [...]

Cartoon of the day

  Special mention

“Accumulate, accumulate!”

For all their complaining about onerous taxes and regulatory uncertainty, capitalists are accumulating capital. And why not? With lots of free money—the unpaid labor of their employees plus virtually free loans from banks—capitalists are choosing to invest in new equipment and software. Their goal, of course, is to capture even more surplus. The problem is, [...]

Map of the day

interactive version Here are some of the relevant facts: Seven in 10 households receiving food stamps had no market income in 2010. Only 21.8 percent of household heads on food stamps had jobs in 2010. More than half of household heads who received food stamps, 51.1 percent, were discouraged workers; they weren’t in the labor [...]

Cartoon of the day

 

“The government is the other”

Theodore R. Marmor and Theodore R. Marmor are, I think, onto something: our language concerning the state has fundamentally changed. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance [...]

Public art of the day

MTM, DG6, SX2BU, G2R, JOX, and ONU DUMBO  

United States of soaring health care premiums

source It’s clear why employers wanted health care reform, and backed Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: to contain their contributions to workers’ healthcare costs. It’s also clear that workers should demand more reform, and to demand single-provider healthcare: to resist the shifting of the healthcare premiums onto them, and to obtain decent healthcare [...]

Mainstream economists’ funeral orations

It was Samuelson who, in 1997, declared with morbid optimism that “Funeral by funeral, economics does make progress.”* Now, Paul Krugman is worried that progress in economics has come to an end. when I was younger I firmly believed that economics was a field that progressed over time, that every generation knew more than the [...]