Category Archives: Social policy

Cathy O’Neil: Glen Hubbard, the Economic Whore

By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who lives in New York City and member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Groups. Cross posted from mathbabe.org

As a loudmouthed data scientist/blogger/activist, I go on record regularly complaining about quants and data scientists who sacrifice their integrity to put out crappy or misleading or exploitative or destructive models because they want to make their bosses happy, or rake in big bonuses, or because they’re afraid to speak up and get fired, or because they don’t bother to think through the consequences of their actions.

But here’s the thing, I’m not sure what anyone can do about economists.

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Desperate Effort by Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle to Silence Discussion about Income Inequality

A tangible sign that the issue of income inequality is taking hold in the American psyche: Tyler Cowen has made a patently ridiculous effort to try to change the topic, and Megan McArdle is dutifully amplifying it.

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Bill Black: The Great Betrayal – and the Cynicism of Calling it a Grand Bargain

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain. Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net. The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.

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Michael M. Thomas: Naked Capitalism – An Insider’s Guide

By Michael M. Thomas, who figured out Wall Street was not all it was cracked up to be before most of you were born

More than any other forum, Naked Capitalism consistently suggests and proposes new ways to bridge what I consider the abyss that will one day sink us all if Koch brothers-style politics and capitalism have their way: the chasm that lies between what we need to know and what we have been (and will be) allowed to know.

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Launching the NC 2012 Fundraiser!

Last year, around this time, NC held its first fundraiser. You helped show that Naked Capitalism was a valuable place for honest discourse, a corner of the world where we could peer into the abyss, together. It worked. Your generosity helped us upgrade the site’s infrastructure, bring in a series of guest bloggers, and in a host of ways large and small, aid us in ruthlessly describing the destructive impact of growing power of elite finance in the US and abroad.

As we move toward the elections, I’m going to ask all of you to join me once again.

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Rentier CEOs Advocate Austerity for America

Felix Salmon did an admirable takedown of a “CEOs [sic] Deficit Manifesto” in the Wall Street Journal. It’s yet another entry in the long-running, dishonest campaign funded by billionaire Pete Peterson to pretend that all right thinking people (and of course CEOs believe they have the right to think for everybody else) should be all in favor of trashing the middle class and the economy through misguided deficit cutting.

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Philip Pilkington: Why “Free Markets” Accommodate Speculation and Lead to Disequilibrium

Philip Pilkington is an Irish writer and journalist living in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

Perhaps the most effective myth that mainstream economists have propagated over the course of the last century is the idea that the majority of prices in an advanced capitalist economy are set by the interaction of supply and demand in a market for scarce resources. Perhaps the second most effective myth they have spread is that this interaction tends toward equilibrium and stability.

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Bill Moyers: Plutocracy Rising

Bill Moyer’s latest show, with Matt Taibbi and and Chrystia Freeland, focuses on how the super rich have established a yawning chasm between themselves and ordinary Americans, both in financial and physical terms. One major focus is view the rich are where they are by virtue of their talents and efforts, not (say) by regulatory and tax arbitrage, and how they’ve convinced themselves and a large swathe of society of this myth.

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Walmart, the Most Powerful Company in the World, Admits that Protests and Strikes Lead to Wage Increases

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller

For the first time ever, a strike is taking place in America aimed at the most powerful company in the economy: Walmart.

The possible strike could be very significant, because the target of the strike is the most important driver of the race to the bottom economy

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Charter Schools Fail the Math Test in Battleground Chicago

Last year, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof highlighted a fundamental inconsistency in the increasingly heated discussion about public education in America. In other walks of life, no one would challenge the notion that you get what you pay for. Kristof pointed out that it only made sense that if you wanted better educational outcomes in the US, you need to pay teachers more. But the public wants a pony: higher quality education while demonizing teachers and cutting their pay.

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Michael Hoexter: Deficit Hawks (Obama, Romney, Bowles, Boehner) Plan to Shrink YOUR Economy – Part 2

Michael Hoexter is a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.

Shrinking “Their” Economy Shrinks Yours

The word “economy” comes from the Greek “oikos” meaning “hearth” or “household”. Everybody has a household economy that looks slightly different from that of their neighbors. However, because of the nature of a monetary economy, household economies are linked quite tightly together and trends that effect one household start to have effects in other households soon or over the longer term. While within the same economy some households can prosper while others do not, generally there is a movement in tandem for some obvious reasons related to how society and the monetary system work.

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