How ‘Competitive’ Tax and Incentive Policies Hurt Small U.S. Businesses
Supposedly ‘competitive’ policies on tax favor multinational firms over smaller, locally-based ones and also reduce market competition.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Gaius Publius: What Sanders Can Accomplish by Not Acting
Bernie Sanders, if elected President, could accomplish an enormous amount without Congress.
Read more...Who Needs Balanced Trade? Who Needs Balanced Budgets?
Who needs balanced trade? It’s time to challenge the premises of “trade” deals like the TransPacific Partnership.
Read more...Gaius Publius: What’s Called “Capitalism” Is Far from Any Model of Capitalism or Market
Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky take a hard look at what passes for capitalism.
Read more...Frances Coppola: The Great Yield Divergence
Puzzling over the Great Divergence of real and nominal yields. Ever since the Great Depression, nominal yields have been persistently above real yields Yet in the previous 200 years, despite periods of fiat currency and high inflation, real and nominal yields didn’t diverge. Why do they now?
Read more...Private Equity Underperformance Denialist, Pension Consulting Alliance, Tells CalSTRS to Fix Performance Problems by Scrapping Benchmark
CalSTRS’ and CalPERS’ consultant, Pension Consulting Alliance, argues for getting rid of benchmarks altogether in a desperate effort to depict investing in private equity as ever and always sound.
Read more...Greece: No Lessons Learned
Greece, which has undertaken the most severe austerity, has experienced the deepest economic contraction. But the policy quackery continues.
Read more...Nicholas Shaxson: Why a ‘Competitive’ Economy Means Less Competition
Nicholas Shaxson explains how a “Competitiveness Agenda” is being used to set industrial policies that favor the creation of what used to be called “national champions,” as in Really Big Companies. Never mind that neoliberals officially oppose anything so interventionist as industrial policy….
Read more...Building a Historical Index of Happiness Using Google Books
Is there merit in trying to measure happiness hundreds of years ago versus now?
Read more...Contemporary Capitalism: Neoliberal Capitalism, Financialized Capitalism, or Globalized Capitalism?
Why “neoliberal” is the framework that best describes our new, post 1980 form of capitalism.
Read more...Frances Coppola: Rethinking Government Debt and Monetary Sovereignity
Debunking the uniformed and regularly hysterical mainstream treatment of government debt and deficits.
Read more...Low Unemployment with Falling Capacity Utilization… Not a Good Sign for Fed Liftoff
Why the Fed should delay its long-anticipated “liftoff”.
Read more...Corbynomics 101: A Guide to People’s QE (PQE)
Why the three big charges commonly made against Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE, are all wet.
Read more...Credit Rating Agencies and Brazil: S&P as Neoliberal Enforcer
Mind you, the rating agencies are far from the only neoliberal enforcers as far as emerging economies are concerned. But it is nevertheless instructive to compare an official rationale with data.
Read more...Spillovers of Pro-Social Motivation: Evidence From a Randomised Intervention Study on Blood Donors
Evidence suggests that people are more likely to behave in a pro-social way if they are aware of others who behave in such a manner. This column finds evidence for this phenomenon among blood donors. For every unit increase in a donor’s motivation, there is a 44% spillover in motivation to their fellow tenant. There is an overall increase in donation rates due to such a social multiplier of 17.9 percentage points, instead of the 10 percentage points obtained by calling an isolated donor.
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