Things look very different from 198o onward. During this era, we see faster automation but only a few technologies counterbalancing the antilabor bias of automation. Wage growth also slowed down as the labor movement became increasingly impaired. In fact, lack of resistance from the labor movement was likely an important cause of the greater emphasis […]
economics
Consider the example given by Martin Feldstein (1999) of a group of well-heeled economists gathered at a conference or subscribers to an economic journal. If each of us—the economists—were given $1,000, inequality (in the United States) would go up; each of us would be better off and no one would be worse off. So what […]
The link between income distribution and aggregate demand is central to post-Keynesian and heterodox economics, yet largely sidelined in mainstream policy debates. The logic is simple: lower-income households have a higher marginal propensity to consume than the wealthy. An extra euro in the hands of a poorer household is mostly spent; in the hands of […]
In my long post about silver prices, I talked about a reversion to the mean. This is something that frequently happens in life: something overshoots the norm and then it swings back and overshoots the abnormal. Slowly but surely it finally settles smack in the middle of the bell curve, to use a shit metaphor. […]
~by Sean Paul Kelley So, Marku asks: But aren’t most of those contracts never expecting to take physical delivery? Just gambling, er excuse me, investment hedging? Or is the problem that given that Comex price is under the real, that all those contracts *want* to be exercised in delivery so they can arbitrage to China […]
. What yours truly most admires about Ann Pettifor is her ability to cut through economic abstraction with clarity and moral purpose. She identifies what most mainstream economists miss: that finance is not a mere technical side note, but the very arena where power and real-world consequences collide. Her Minsky-Keynes-inspired analysis of the financial system […]
Jamie: Lars, perhaps a useful place to start would be with some introductory comment on what informs your reasoning. Whilst your postings range across many subjects you regularly return to a common theme. Specifically, the use economists make of mathematics to express theory and of analytical statistical techniques to conduct research. What are the key […]
The 2026 Oxfam report, Our Unequal Sweden, issues a damning indictment of the nation’s economic trajectory, systematically dismantling the enduring myth of Swedish egalitarianism. It reveals a society undergoing a profound and deliberate schism, where escalating mass vulnerability exists in parallel with unprecedented wealth consolidation among a tiny elite. The empirical evidence is overwhelming and […]
One of the most important things to understand about companies and countries both is the difference between sustainable prosperity and burning down the house. You’re probably aware that Boeing has serious problems. Those problems have been obviously “on the way” for a long time. When Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle (where it makes most […]
Jaysus on a popsicle, Mary and all the Saints do I have some egg on my face. Since January 27 silver has been on one seriously wicked ride. I’ve been banging my head to Metallica’s Whiplash for the last ten days. So, WTF happened? In short: from where I sit the paper markets are trying […]