Yves here. One of the things that is bothersome about the ongoing discussion of robots (or more generally automation) taking jobs is the lack of precision as to how that takes place. And that lack may lead to overestimation.
Read more...Naked Capitalism readers have frequently called for the Post Office to offer basic banking services, as post offices long have in many countries, notably Japan. That idea has gotten an important official endorsement in the form of a detailed, extensively researched concept paper prepared by the Postal Service’s Inspector General.
Read more...Investors cry crocodile tears over subprime blight even though it helped line their pockets.
Read more...Normally I try not to pay much attention to Davos because it is meant to reinforce the idea that plutocracy is simply a manifestation of natural aristocracy.
Read more...One big difference between West Coast and East Coast oligarchs is that a lot fewer people lionize the Eastern ones. But a pending lawsuit may finally tarnish some Silicon Valley halos.
Read more...So many of the assertions made about “maximizing shareholder value” are false that they should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Read more...Yves here. I’m featuring this post in part as a development exercise to Cliff, a German economist who has been blogging off and on since 2011 and plans to post on a more consistent basis. He has been warned that the NC readership can be rough. His thesis: “Home production may be a popular or cultural preference, economically sensible it is not.”
Read more...So now we know why the Republicans have been going to such extreme lengths to try to preserve embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a national figure…
Read more...Yves here. Bad enough having to worry about offshoring eating into your employment prospects and compensation level. Alan Blinder, in Senate testimony in 2007, had argued that up to 29% of US jobs were “offshorable,” including many service industry positions. And now this….
Read more...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...Why you can be sure Obama’s talking up progressive issues, like minimum wages, is another effort to re-entice (and re-deceive) the left-leaning voters that voted him in in 2008.
Read more...As we discussed earlier, even though there’s abundant evidence that the Administration’s plans to push through its trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transstlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are in trouble, the official messaging has been to keep pretending that the pacts are still moving forward smartly.
Read more...Yves here. Wolf’s latest post gives a crisp overview of how bad things are in job land. Among other things, he highlights the catastrophically high unemployment levels among young people, and how financially stressed older workers are hanging on to jobs much more than they used to in the past.
Read more...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...Yves here. I don’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff retreat from their pro-austerity stance and endorse debt restructuring, since their prior view (that budget-cutting was necessary and productive) served to justify considerable and unnecessary pain being inflicted on periphery Eurozone countries to preserve the illusion of health of French and German banks.
But as Yanis Varoufakis points out, although Reinhart and Rogoff are retreating from much of their erroneous thinking, they haven’t renounced all of it.
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