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...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...“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...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 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...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 if the long-term unemployed entered System D, the informal economy?
Read more...Should society value work, and if so, how?
Read more...Reader Deontos sent a link to a provocative article on SSRN, The Lawyer-Rent Seeker Myth, by Teresa Schmid. Schmid focuses explicitly on the impact of economic theory on how legal services are delivered. Using county-level data in Oregon, Schmid make a persuasive case that lack of access to legal representation isn’t just a social justice issue but is also an economic problem, since it exacerbates poverty and inequality.
Read more...The question of why graduates of prestigious undergraduate schools still wind up, in disproportionate numbers, at places like Goldman and McKinsey may seem so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. Yet perversely, the students aren’t keen about these jobs despite having competed fiercely to land them.
Read more...Yves here. If we had a bona fide democracy left in America, as opposed to a simulacrum of one, the night-after-night spectacle of constabulary overkill in Ferguson would spark outrage and a concerted effort to restrict militarized policing, particularly against peaceful protestors. Officials knew precisely what was at stake when they kept journalists as far away as possible from the 17 city, coordinated paramilitary crackdown against Occupy Wall Street.
But now that many comparatively small cities have war toys like tanks in their possession, and are also hiring former soldiers, it appears that we’ve passed an event horizon. Unless some of these municipalities are prepared to get rid of this militarized policing gear (and not by giving it to another city, but by destroying it or letting it deteriorate into uselessness), it’s inconceivable that the police won’t continue to abuse their greatly expanded powers.
Read more...One widely accepted nostrum is that falling birth rates, particularly when accompanied by rising life spans, are bad for economic growth and therefore bad generally. The assumption is that a shrinking pool of 20 to 65 year olds will be forced to support a larger and larger cohort of unproductive citizens, namely, the aged. That vision, of young people hostage to parasitic elders, is also one of the foundations of boomer hate, which is actively stoked by major Republican party funder Stan Druckenmiller, who has been touring college campuses to sell the false notion that Social Security and other social safety nets for the elderly are bad for them.
That picture is at odds with what is actually happening in advanced economies.
Read more...* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time’s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.
Read more...Yves here. Some technology enthusiasts predict that as many as 47% of current jobs will be displaced in the next decade. Candidates include not only trucking and bus driving (to be eliminated by self-driving vehicles) but more and more white collar work, as computer get better at the sort of information scanning and analysis that is now done by entry and low-level workers. This post examines different scenarios for how that might play out in Europe.
Read more...A Nicholas Lemann profile of Janet Yellen in the New Yorker, based on interviews with her, is creating quite a stir, and for many of the wrong reasons. The article verges on fawning, but even after you scrape off the treacle, it’s not hard to see how aggressively and consistently the Fed chair hits her big talking point, that’s she’s on the side of the little guy. As correspondent Li put it:
She’s simultaneously Mother Teresa (spent her whole life caring about the poor without actually meeting any poor people) and Forrest Gump (present when all bad deregulatory polcies were made, but miraculously untainted by them).
Puh-lease! She’s Bernanke in a granny package, without the history lessons.
In fact, as we’ll discuss, Yellen’s record before and at the Fed shows she’s either aligned herself with banking/elite interests or played two-handed economist to sit out important policy fights. Even if she actually harbors concern for ordinary citizens, she’s never been willing to risk an ounce of career capital on it.
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