Where has all the surplus gone?

Where has all the surplus gone? As in 2010, a good chunk of it has gone to pay Chief Executive Officers of major U.S. companies. According to a new Associated Press study, the head of a typical public company in United States made $9.6 million in 2011. This figure was up more than 6 percent [...]

Greece’s “corrupt and venal classes”

The success of Costas Lapavitsas’s proposal [ht: br] that Greece leave the eurozone depends on the meaning of the following phrase: Its growth prospects are strong, as long as it wrenches power from the corrupt and venal classes that have run its affairs for decades.

Surplus-seeking behavior

As it turns out, the members of the surplus-seeking class, aka the “job creators,” really don’t say anything different away from the cameras compared to their public pronouncements. In both cases, “They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution.” That’s what Adam [...]

A Bernanke conundrum?

Is there a real conundrum concerning Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke aka Helicopter Ben? Paul Krugman thinks so, because there’s an apparent “divergence between what Professor Bernanke advocated and what Chairman Bernanke has actually done.” Maybe Professor Bernanke was wrong, and there’s nothing more a policy maker in this situation can do. Maybe politics are [...]

Titanic—symbolic tragedy

Daniel Mendelsohn is right: for all the new angles on the tragic sinking of the Titanic, the theme of class (as captured in Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember) is the one that stands out. overshadowing everything is the problem of money and class. The Titanic’s story irresistibly reads as a parable about a gilded [...]

Whoops! They did it again

It’s a sign of the ongoing crises of capitalism that a wide variety of mainstream publications, from Business Week to the Harvard Business Review, have found it necessary to publish articles on Marx and the continuing relevance of Marxian economics. And so they look around and find someone—although rarely a Marxist economist or actual Marxist [...]

The knowledge economy and its poor

Not longer after I finished my post on the knowledge economy, I decided to open my recently purchased copy of Jacques Rancière’s book, The Philosophy and His Poor. And there it was, the idea that haunted my scribblings, which Rancière had identified in the history of philosophy: The order of discourse delimited itself by tracing [...]

Fair is fair

Let’s give Mark Thoma credit for raising the issue of fairness. But, fair is fair, he gets a lot wrong in the process.* Thoma’s basic premise is that, while from a neoclassical perspective the distribution of income is fair under the assumption of perfect competition, “when there are important deviations from the purely competitive markets” [...]

Hard times—for these times

OK, let’s give Mr. Gradgrind what he wants: the facts. Austerity in Greece is killing people, literally. Greek doctors are fighting a new invisible foe every day at their hospitals: a pneumonia-causing superbug that most existing antibiotics can’t kill. . . George Daikos, an associate professor of medicine at Laiko General, won one battle last [...]

Is economics always performative?

Is economics always performative? I often argue that economics is performative, in the sense that economists not only describe the world in particular ways but also create the world through the theories they use and the policies they advocate. Chris Dillow uses a similar concept of performativity in remarking on the piece by Aditya Chakrabortty [...]