INET in the News

“The new acting Deputy Prime Minister for EU funds is called Atanas Pekanov. The young expert, who recently turned 30, is an economist at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, Austria, and a lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). … Member of the Young Researchers Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Darik

“Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has documented how U.S. big business interests poured money into local and state elections to ensure positive support for their largely unpopular policies. What Ferguson calls “political investment” is the practice of spending serious sums on party competition to keep hand-picked, docile representatives in power.” — Duncan Cameron, Rabble

“Pandemic management will also have to overcome the knotty issue of political economy. The blame game between the Union and state governments over an essential commodity such as oxygen is visible in court proceedings. We need a transparent mechanism that is perceived to be fair and trusted by all the stakeholders. Apart from dealing with the allocation of vaccines and other essential medical supplies such as oxygen, this body could suggest the financing pattern for sharing the expenditure on Covid management, including vaccine procurement. … Far too many lives have been lost to Covid. But as a challenge to India (and to humanity), it is certainly not an impossible task to manage the pandemic. But this can only happen effectively with cooperation, coordination, empathy, humility and scientific knowledge. It is not too late.” — Arjun Jayadev, Hindustan Times

“Just now read this fascinating interview by Janine Jackson of fair.org (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) with Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking on how hedge fund managers are damaging American companies by pushing company managements to do stock buybacks. Basically, stock buybacks force up the price of a stock, allowing shareholders to make megabucks when they sell. Such buybacks were difficult until the Reagan administration loosened the regulations in 1982. Why are stock buybacks bad ? Because they divert money from research, from new investments and innovation, and from raising wages. The interview with Lynn Parramore goes into the details.” — Daily Kos

“In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future. Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.” — Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times

“Researchers involved in a new study from Washington University say women could be in trouble financially for years to come because of significant job losses during the crisis. “We have to be somewhat concerned that the larger inequality effects of the current crisis could have these persistent impacts on wages and on career progress in all the groups that are disproportionately affected,” said Steven Fazzari, a professor of economics and sociology at Wash U who co-authored the study.” — Andrea Y. Henderson, St. Louis Public Radio NPR

“Yet notable critics like Joseph Stiglitz and Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, see woefully insufficient production by Western drug companies as a major roadblock to universal vaccination.” — Walden Bello, New York Times

“Right after the CDC made this announcement, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, sent a letter to the Biden administration, citing a study by the Institute for Economic Thinking. … The authors of the study are Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, who did much of the research for the study and is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist and senior lecturer at the William Harvey Research Institute in London; Dr. Phillip Alveldi, CEO and chairman of Brain Works Foundry Inc, a U.S.-based developer of artificial intelligence-enhanced health care technologies and services; and Thomas Ferguson, the director of research projects for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Dennis Donohue, Santa Fe New Mexican

“Polluting companies tell us every day how they’re invested in the future; we’ve heard corporations en masse say, “Profits, what? We’re all about the people now!” There’s a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they’re-the-solution that we can see through, but there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes. We’ll talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.” — CounterSpin

“Today joined by Dr Arjun Jayadev, who is a Professor of Economics at the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. He was previously Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also closely involved with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I speak to him about the basic links between IPRs and the pandemic; the long-held orthodoxy in economic theory on the importance of IPRs, especially in areas like health; how IPRs lead to suboptimalities like hoarding of knowledge, vaccine grabs and other global inequalities; the relationship between public funding and vaccine production; whether private profits being produced from public investments; and finally, the problem of vaccine nationalism.” — Chayakkada Chats

“To do this properly, we need to understand the structure of markets for knowledge-based products like new vaccines. Currently, we do not: the “market” is a mishmash of competition and side deals. According to a recent paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, governments and pharmaceutical companies last year concluded 44 bilateral COVID-19 vaccine deals, many of which have undisclosed details and poorly understood escape clauses. Poor countries were, by and large, left out.” — Kaushik Basu, Project Syndicate

“But ultra-low interest rates may be doing more harm than good, economist William White says in a working paper published last month by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. White, a former economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements, has a number of arguments against this central bank policy. First, while lower borrowing costs do initially accomplish their goal of spurring spending, much of it is on “unproductive purchases” by both households and corporations that only wind up increasing the debt burden. Second, low interest rates can actually destabilize financial markets and the institutions surrounding them, either through inflated prices, encouraging fund managers to take on riskier investments, or hindering how banks and lenders are supposed to do business, White argues. And then there’s the exit problem. Once central banks lower interest rates, it’s very hard to tighten the flow of easy money. “Each cycle of monetary easing contributes to a buildup of undesired side effects that raises the likelihood of future instability,” White writes. “Central banks are then lured into a ‘debt trap’ where they refrain from tightening, to avoid triggering the crisis that they wish to avoid, but that restraint only makes the underlying problems worse.” — Diccon Hyatt, The Balance

“Some authors argue that the German export success has nothing to do with wage or unit labour cost moderation and is instead due to the country’s high non-price competitiveness.” — Lucio Baccaro and Tobias Tober, LSE

“The much-touted “new thinking” on fiscal policy and debt is actually very thin and little of it is new. In the 1990s, economist Luigi Pasinetti clarified the folly of the proposed Maastricht criteria for public finances and forecast the coming disaster with those. Subsequently, many economists, including more than a few working with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, showed in detail how austerity reduces potential output over time and how absurd theories about Phillips Curve trade-offs lead to big underestimates of real rates of unemployment. Running below full employment for long periods blows big holes in public finances and thus piles on debt.” – Thomas Ferguson

“A study by Nobel Laureate James Heckman found that every dollar invested in a high-quality, birth to five program for the most economically disadvantaged children resulted in $7.30 in benefits as children grew up healthier, were more likely to graduate high school and college, were less likely to be involved in crime, and earned more as adults.” — The White House