Spanish Protests Escalate as Budget Cuts Draw Blood
It’s been fashionable to dismiss protests in austerity-victim countries as noise. And to date, that view has been correct. But maybe not any longer.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
“Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals?”
Luigi Zingales, who teaches at the University of Chicago’s business school, had an op-ed in Bloomberg provocatively titled “Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals?” He argues that business schools are “partly to blame” for the decline in ethical standards in the business world, and urges that ethics not be taught as a separate course by lightweight profs, but integrated into all courses.
This piece is so backwards I don’t quite know where to begin.
Read more...Is Public Ownership A Solution?
Real News Network presented a two part interview with Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, on why and where public provision of services might be preferable to private sector solutions. Alperovitz pointed out how the growth expectations for public companies are at odds with resource conservation and how their rampant short-termism stunts investment. Some economists have recently taken a systematic look at the latter problem.
Read more...Is a New “Take No Prisoners” a Model for Social Change?
Lambert pointed to a recent Harvard Business Review blog post that posited the question of whether it would be possible to engineer a mirror image of the Stanford Prison experiment, in which subjects were put in a mock prison setting, cast either as guards or inmates. The experiment had to be aborted within days as the guards quickly became sadistic. But could a setting be created in which good behavior would be fostered? The pitch from the post:
Read more...Is Spain Going the Way of Greece?
In the “great minds work alike” category, both some readers (Hugh and LaMarchaNegra) and some of my investor e-mail correspondents (Scott, Ed Harrison, Marshall Auerback) took notice of how things are looking bad on the way to worse. Despite an unemployment rate of 25% and rising social unrest, the government just increased sales taxes to 21%. Ed Harrison sent a note to his Credit Writedowns Pro customers describing how Spain’s problem isn’t its government debt levels per se, but its deficits and the way it is soon to be saddled by regional debts and bank bailout costs. And because some of the creditor nations are dead set against debt mutualization, Spain will need to find a way to deal with its banking system losses.
Read more...Does the American Elite Want Real Public Education?
This Real News Network segment tackles the ugly topic of whether the deterioration of public education in the US is by design. You might also want to see the earlier shows in this series, the first on Obama’s educational policies, the second on Romney’s.
Read more...The Great Capitalist Heist: How Paris Hilton’s Dogs Ended Up Better Off Than You
By Gerald Friedman, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author, most recently, of “Reigniting the Labor Movement” (Routledge, 2007). Edited by Lynn Parramore and produced in partnership with author Douglas Smith and Econ4. Cross posted from Alternet.
Summer 2009. Unemployment is soaring. Across America, millions of terrified people are facing foreclosure and getting kicked to the curb. Meanwhile in sunny California, the hotel-heiress Paris Hilton is investing $350,000 of her $100 million fortune in a two-story house for her dogs. A Pepto Bismol-colored replica of Paris’ own Beverly Hills home, the backyard doghouse provides her precious pooches with two floors of luxury living, complete with abundant closet space and central air.
Read more...Massive Furor in UK Over Libor Manipulation; Where’s the Outrage Here?
In case it isn’t yet apparent to you, the unfolding scandal over manipulation of Libor and its Euro counterpart Euribor is a huge deal. Even though at this point, only Barclays, the UK bank that was first to settle, is in the hot lights, at least 16 other major financial players, which means pretty much everybody, is implicated.
Read more...France Pushing for a Maximum Wage; Will Others Follow?
A reader pointed out a news item we missed, namely, that the new government in France is trying to implement a maximum wage for the employees of state-owned companies. From the Financial Times:
Read more...ObamaCare, the “Market State” and Nudge Theory
Yves here. Big decision when Lambert and I are short on bandwidth, so this is just first impressions.
Read more...Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day
An article in the Boston Review by professor of sociology Claude Fischer falls prey to a pattern that is all too common: attributing social/political outcomes to American attitudes without bothering to examine why those attitudes came to be.
Let me give you a bit of useful background before I turn to the Fischer article as an illustration of a lack of curiosity, or worse, among soi disant intellectuals in America, and how it keeps Americans ignorant as to how many of our supposed cultural values have been cultivated to inhibit disruptive thought and action.
Read more...Mark Ames: The Left’s Big Sellout – How the ACLU and Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Daily Banter.
Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself.
Read more...“Great Latvian Success Story!”
You too can be an IMF success story if you grind your population into penury by wearing the austerian hairshirt. And this little video (hat tip Nathan) has to skip over capture some of the extreme measures operating in Latvia, such as bankers taking souls as collateral for loans.
Read more...Finance and the Mafia State
By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross-posted from Macrobusiness.
The argument advanced by the historian Philip Bobbitt that a transition is occurring in world politics from the nation state to the market state has long appealed as a snapshot of what is occurring in world politics. It is, as with any thesis about a large subject, far too simple to reflect accurately all that is happening, but it is nevertheless a fine starting point. As we witness the political travails plaguing southern Europe, it gives us a useful analytic to trace the outline of what is happening.
That, at least, is what I used to think. I am starting to wonder if something very different is happening.
Read more...Austerity Kills: How the EuroCrisis is Being Used to Break the Social Contract
One aspect of the Eurocrisis that has not gotten the attention it deserves is the way it is destroying not just jobs, but the very underpinnings of society.
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