Philip Pilkington: Behavioral Economics as Victorian Moralizing
Why behavioural economics is nothing but Victorian morality passed down to the modern age.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
Minimum Wages: The Effects on Employment and Labour-Force Turnover
Minimum-wage increases are associated with a lower probability that a job will end, and with a lower probability that an unemployed person will find work.
Read more...Debunking the Idea that “Structural Reforms” Reduce Unemployment
Both the IMF and the ECB call for “structural reforms” which are code for further weakening labor protection as beneficial to “competitiveness” and job creation. Does this claim stand up to scrutiny?
Read more...Can Chile Reform the Neoliberal Model?
Chile is often a social laboratory that gives an advance view of what is coming……
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Greek Finance Minister Reveals Advanced Case of Stockholm Syndrome
This is a stupendous story. Possibly for the first time in its tainted history, the International Monetary Fund had a major change of heart and tried to do the right thing by a ‘program’ country, only to be turned down by that very same country’s finance minister!
Read more...Frigid Weather Puts Homeless at Risk
Yves here. Although the current spell of nasty cold weather isn’t unusual by the standards of three decades ago, in the intervening years we’ve also had a big increase in homelessness, which means a lot more people are at risk of freezing to death.
Read more...The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare
Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy
The European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.
Read more...Michael Sandel: The Moral Limits of Markets
Since I imagine many of you are staying indoors even more than usual on a winter Saturday due to the nasty weather in the Northeast and Midwest, I though a video double-header was in order.
Read more...Bill Moyers Talks with Thomas Cahill About the People’s Pope
In this segment, Thomas Cahill, author of the Hinges of History series and former director of religious publishing for Doubleday, discusses how Pope Francis is upsetting both conservatives in the Catholic Church and the public generally through his stress on traditional Christian values.
Read more...Should Taxpayers Subsidize Insuring Homeowners Against Climate-Change-Induced Flood Damage?
The problem of who should bear the costs of climate-change-induced rises in flood frequency in coastal communities is difficult even before throwing in the not-trivial problem that is it also highly politicized.
Read more...Ilargi: Everything Better Is Purchased At The Price Of Something Worse
Yves here. While I suspect the general thesis of this post will appeal to many readers, I’m bothered by the use of “price” and “purchase” to describe the idea that progress is not linear and in many respects may add up to less in terms of satisfaction than we’d like to believe.
Read more...Solomonic Judgment vs. Sophists, Economists and Calculators
Yves here. This essay achieves the difficult task of working through some of the implications of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which might alternatively be called “the inescapability of politics theorem” in an accessible manner. In fact, one of the conclusions that the author Raphaële Chappe focuses on is that how well a society “does politics” matters, that the structure and health of institutions matter. Thus it’s perverse that economics, which readers of this blog understand full well is really political economy, has virtually no interest in questions of governance (the closest it comes is in principal/agent and game theory and information asymmetry).
Read more...Was Scrooge a Neoliberal?
A Christmas Carol is often mistakenly charged with creating our contemporary, festive, largely secular Christmas. And while that may have been one of Dickens’ motives, a bigger one is more obvious: that of better treatment of children and the working poor.
Read more...Patrick Durusau: A Salinas Card
The Supreme Court delivers an ugly holiday surprise.
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