The gilded age: a tale of today*

The timing could not have been better, at least for me. It just so happens I’m teaching Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class this week. It should become quickly obvious to students that, as I have argued before on this blog, we’re now in the midst of a Second Gilded Age. This is confirmed […]

Tackle this!

The latest IMF Fiscal Monitor, “Tackling Inequality,” is out and it represents a direct challenge to the United States. It’s not just a rebuke to Donald Trump, who with his allies is pursuing under the guise of “tax reform” a set of policies that will lead to even greater inequality—or, for that matter, Republicans in state […]

Looking for answers

I’m pleased to announce the Democratic Left Scotland has just published Stephen Whitefield’s interview with me. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss the rethinking of Marxism in the United States and its political implications, the difference between political and economic populism, the significance of the Bernie Sanders campaign and how the U.S. left […]

Bottom line

The business press is having a hard time figuring out this one: the combination of unrelenting drama in and around Donald Trump’s White House and the stability (signaled by the very low volatility) on Wall Street. As CNN-Money notes, One of the oldest sayings on Wall Street is that investors hate uncertainty. But that adage, much like other conventional wisdom, […]

Essays in persuasion

I’m often asked—by students and readers of this blog—why I include Keynesian economics, alongside neoclassical economics, within mainstream economic theory. The major reason I do so is because the mainstream debate within the discipline of economics is mostly confined within limits defined by neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics—between (as I explained last year), the conservative invisible […]

Themes of 2016

Looking back over the past year, here are the ten major themes I found in my blog posts: inequality critique of mainstream economics the U.S. presidential election, especially Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump class and surplus epistemology, especially uncertainty utopia working-class corporations and capital academy critique of liberalism We’ll see what happens in the current year. . […]

Class and Trumponomics

President-elect Donald Trump has inherited an economy that is as divided as the electorate. The question is, what will that economy look like if and when Trump’s right-wing national-populist promises and post-election proposals are enacted? As I have shown in the three installments of the first part of this series, “Class Before Trumponomics” (here, here, and here), […]

Capital on strike?

One thing is clear in the current conjuncture: corporate investment in capital equipment is declining, and it’s dragging overall economic growth and labor productivity down with it. In the second quarter of 2016, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of only 1.2 percent, which caught business commentators and Wall Street analysts by surprise. […]

Business as usual

Is anyone else struck by the contradiction between what is actually going on in the world and the fact that, for those in charge, it’s just business as usual? Consider, for example, the decision to drop the charges against the three remaining officers facing trial in connection with the April 2015 death in policy custody of […]

Thought control in economics

No matter how many stories I tell them about thought control in economics, students and colleagues in other disciplines simply don’t believe me. They don’t understand the restrictions on the professors who are hired in many economics departments, the narrow range of methods and perspectives published in the leading economics journals, the limits on economics research projects […]