From Public Citizen: Top 10 Most Pernicious Investor-State Dispute Settlement Lawsuits
The Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) under TTP and TTIP erodes state sovereignty and the ability of states to protect citizens.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
The Biocultural Origins of Human Capital Formation and Economic Growth
The substitution from child quantity to quality has been credited for mankind’s escape from the Malthusian trap and the advent of sustained economic growth. This column argues that biocultural preferences for quality faced positive selection pressure in the pre-growth era, presenting evidence from the founding population of Quebec. Individuals with moderate levels of fecundity had fewer children than those with high fecundity, but produced more descendants in the long run because their children enjoyed higher reproductive success.
Read more...The Tenacity of Free Market Fundamentalism
This is an important and wide ranging conversation about the history of economic ideas and how it played out in political discourse, specifically, how free market fundamentalism, an idea that appeared to be dead in the 1940s, survived and became dominant.
Read more...For-Profit Colleges as Factories of Debt
Yves here. The American higher education system has been sucking more and more of the economic life out of the children that supposedly represent our best and brightest, the ones with intelligence and self-disipline to do well enough to be accepted at college.
But even though the press has given some attention to how young adults, and sometimes their hapless parent/grandparent co-signers, can wind up carrying huge millstones of debt, there’s been comparatively less focus on the for-profit segment of the market. While their students constitute only 13% of the total college population, they account for 31% of student loans. Why such a disproportionately high debt load? As this post explains, the for-profit colleges are master predators, seeking out vulnerable targets like single mothers who will do what they think it takes to set themselves up to land a middle class job. This is the new American lower-class version of P.T. Barnum’s “a sucker is born every minute.” These social aspirants are easy to exploit because they haven’t gotten the memo that the American Dream is dead.
Read more...Revisiting the Modest Proposal: Q&A with a Skeptic – Fall 2014 version (*)
The Modest Proposal will stem the European crisis without breaking any rules, without having the core countries pay one euro for the debts and losses of the periphery, and without any further diminution of national sovereignty.
Read more...Scottish Independence Vote: Results, Ramifications and Neglected Corners
Results, Ramifications and Neglected Corners of the Scottish Independence Vote
Read more...Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws
Yves here. It is gratifying to see economists take up the question of when laws work, and perhaps even more important, how to make laws work even when they conflict with social norms. In typical economists’ fashion, they contend that as far as businesses work, fines work but more rules don’t. On further examination, that conclusion may not be well founded.
Read more...Class Bigots: Finding Themselves On Third Base and Thinking They Hit a Triple
Yves here. I’m featuring this post from Angry Bear because it presents a vivid example of an increasingly common form of economic hatred: that of seeing anyone lower on the income ladder as fully deserving of their lowly status and a potential, if not actual, social parasite.
Read more...All in the Family: How the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and Other Billionaires Are Undermining America
Yves here. Even though monied dynasties have long had outsized influence in the US, Steve Fraser contends that billionaires and their scions like the Koch brothers, the Walton heirs, and Sheldon Adelson wield far more power than their predecessors and are in the process of remaking America.
Read more...Matt Stoller: 5 Reasons for the Zephyr Teachout Phenomenon, and 5 Reasons Andrew Cuomo Is Still Governor
“New York’s a small town run by 1,000 decision-makers.” So says Hank Sheinkopf, a consultant in New York politics for more than 40 years and bouncer for the billionaire-fueled New York Democratic establishment. So how did Zephyr, who was not one of those decision-makers, have such an impact? I’ll try to answer that question and offer some observations her campaign and what it meant.
Read more...Low Wage Growth, High Long-Term Unemployment Recognized as International Problem
High unemployment and low wage growth are solvable problems. But powerful and well placed people believe it is in their interest to keep them unsolved
Read more...Finance and Social Justice
Finance and social justice are linked issues, but the tone of reader comments suggest readers increasingly see them as separate. But steering clear of the more technical coverage of banking, economics, and financial markets plays into the elite financiers’ hands.
Read more...STILL 1.4 Million Fewer Full-Time Jobs Than in 2008
Yves here. Despite his many faults, Bill Clinton at least recognized that the first responsibility of a Democratic president is to create jobs. Of course, Obama is a Democrat in name only, but until recently, just as the nobility understood its duty was to protect the peasants, the powers that be understood that providing for enough employment at at least adequate wages was one of their major responsibilities. Sadly, the idea of having responsibilities is sorely absent among today’s elites.
Read more...What Are the Long-Term Unemployed Doing With Their Time?
What if the long-term unemployed entered System D, the informal economy?
Read more...Labor Day: Human Labor, Human Rental, Human Gift
Should society value work, and if so, how?
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