Economics

Video: An economic reality check

by News Sources 05.09.2013

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The ignorance of economists

by News Sources 04.30.2013

The Economist: “Sovereign in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk, and relentless in maximisation of happiness.” This was Daniel McFadden’s memorable summation, in 2006, of the idea of Everyman held by economists. That this description is unlike any real person was Mr McFadden’s point. The Nobel prizewinning economist at the University of California, [...]

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The next money: As the big economies falter, micro-currencies rise

by News Sources 05.16.2012

Eric Garland writes: People everywhere are fed up with the status quo of the economy. With the passion our official institutions show for this tepid “recovery,” many are concluding that progress will come not from the current system, which is after all what got us here in the first place, but from their own ingenuity [...]

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Video: Beat the Press with Dean Baker

by News Sources 04.24.2012

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Video: Jeremy Rifkin — The Third Industrial Revolution

by Attention to the Unseen 01.19.2012

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How austerity is killing Europe

by News Sources 01.07.2012

Jeff Madrick writes: On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, [...]

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Rethinking the growth imperative

by News Sources 01.07.2012

Kenneth Rogoff writes: Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the main social objective in perpetuity, as economics textbooks implicitly assume? Certainly, [...]

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America builds wealth without common wealth

by News Sources 01.03.2012

Umair Haque suggests that to measure the welfare of America, it’s time to focus less on GDP — a measure of the national income — and consider instead an equation that says “real human welfare equals natural capital, plus financial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital.” If one [...]

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The shadow superpower

by News Sources 01.01.2012

Robert Neuwirth writes: With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa’s most populous country. It wasn’t a matter of technology. David is not an [...]

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Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!

by News Sources 12.17.2011

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What happens when the economy stops growing — forever?

by News Sources 12.15.2011

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Occupy economics

by News Sources 12.01.2011

Econ4 economists’ statement in support of Occupy Wall Street: We are economists who oppose ideological cleansing in the economics profession. Equally we oppose political cleansing in the vital debate over the causes and consequences of our current economic crisis. We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the [...]

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The bankers that rule the world

by News Sources 10.22.2011

New Scientist reports: As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis [PDF] of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, [...]

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Enslaved by economics — the story we live by

by News Sources 09.04.2011

Maria Popova reviews Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them [...]

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The failure of the Internet: Why efficiency promotes poverty unless ordinary people can own and sell information

by News Sources 08.30.2011

“What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated.” Jaron Lanier

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We’ve been warned: the system is ready to blow

by News Sources 08.15.2011

From Britain, Larry Elliott writes: For the past two centuries and more, life in Britain has been governed by a simple concept: tomorrow will be better than today. Black August has given us a glimpse of a dystopia, one in which the financial markets buckle and the cities burn. Like Scrooge, we have been shown [...]

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Pt 4 Age of Greed: people should get organized

by News Sources 07.07.2011

(See Part One, Part Two and Part Three.)

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Pt3 Age of Greed: the 90′s and “finance is always good”

by News Sources 07.05.2011

(See Part One and Part Two.)

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Pt 2 Age of Greed: finance and take overs overwhelm reforming manufacturing

by News Sources 07.03.2011

(See Part One here.)

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — Part One

by Paul Woodward 06.12.2011

Adam Curtis‘ latest documentary, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” is well worth watching — all three hours — even if by its conclusion he has not neatly tied together all its disparate threads and even if his style of production has a frenetic choppiness — “I kept thinking the dog was sitting [...]

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — Part Three

by News Sources 06.12.2011

(Watch Part One here and Part Two here.) Part Three: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

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‘Perfect storm’ looms for world’s food supplies

by News Sources 05.31.2011

AFP reports: Oxfam called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the world’s food system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and climate-hit harvests. A “broken food system” means that the price of some staples will more than double by 2030, battering the [...]

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The IMF versus the Arab spring

by News Sources 05.26.2011

Austin Mackell writes: In the midst of the media storm surrounding IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn last week, my feelings were perfectly expressed in a tweet by Paul Kingsnorth: “Could someone please arrest the head of the IMF for screwing the poor for 60 years?” Without diminishing the seriousness of the sexual allegations against Strauss-Kahn, the [...]

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