INET in the News

“There is a lot to like about with this infrastructure plan from what we already know and there seems to be a historical opportunity to get things right. Before answering your question, let me bring us to three trends just for context. Firstly, for decades we’ve had an economic model that benefited a small number of people tremendously and left behind the majority of Americans, resulting in widening inequality and decline in the middle class. The fact that a zip code could predict a lot of things; your health outcome, your lifespan, your success in life is an extremely telling example. Secondly, we’ve had the digital revolution which spanned a good part of the last 15 years that further demonstrated a lot of displacing and polarizing tendencies. If you’re in the wrong parts of the economy so to speak, it really didn’t work that much for you. Thirdly of course, we had the Covid crisis which turbocharged a lot of these trends. A lot of this is to say that sure there’s a lot of roads and bridges to fix and as well as fiscal infrastructure, but how to productively engage more Americans in the economic process through like you said job training and education, through better child care, invest in green recovery, and climate resilience these are paramount tasks.” — Jack Gao, Institute for New Economic Thinking

“So these companies have been hamstrung by these hedge fund activists that are only interested in making a buck as quickly as possible. And they really don’t care about the long-term sustainability or health of the company. Or is it anything the company might want to do in the way of making products in the future? They’re all about the short term. So they are holding American companies back.” — Lynn Parramore

“The economists Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor studied the sensitivity of house prices to interest rates across 14 countries and 140 years of history. They found that a 1 per cent rise in interest rates reduces the ratio of house prices to incomes by about 4 per cent. In New Zealand, for example, that ratio has risen by about half in a decade, implying a double-digit rise in interest rates to stabilise it.” — Robin Harding, FT

Lynn Parramore appeared on Ian Masters to discuss Biden’s stimulus package and the “New Koch Brothers” wrecking America’s green new deal.

“In “Private Equity’s Engagement With Health Care: Cause for Concern?” a report to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, researchers Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt found that wages dropped at urgent care centers after acquisitions by private equity companies. They were 9 to 12 percent lower than hospital wages. More consolidation and Amazon’s relentless drive to suppress costs bode more of the same.” — Brian Alexander, Boston Globe

“As consumers become richer, they spend more on services such as health and education, the demand for which is much more income elastic, and less on agriculture and manufactured goods, according to a recent study, co-led by Diego Comin, a professor of economics. The results are published in Econometrica. Until now, productivity has often been considered at least as important, if not more, than preferences, in shaping the sectoral composition of the economy. Politicians and business leaders often make claims about why certain sectors in the economy are shrinking, such as the decline in U.S. manufacturing is due to robotics or trade with China. Such assessments are flawed, as the sectoral composition of the economy is mostly driven by preferences and not by productivity, according to the study, which models long-run structural change in the economy.” — Amy Olsen, Darmouth News

“From 2010 to 2019 the FDA approved 356 drugs. Recent research from Bentley University finds that NIH funding contributed to every single new drug approved. At a cost to the tax payer of roughly $230 billion dollars. In spite of this contribution the NIH is listed on only 27 of those patents. This suggests that while tax payers provide funding for the bulk of the early stage research they do not get patent protections supposedly secured by the by dole act. In essence American tax payers are paying the highest prices in the world for drugs they already paid to help develop.” — Senator Tammy Baldwin

“As William Lazonick and other analysts have pointed out, stock buybacks artificially inflate executive pay and drain capital that could be put to productive purpose. .[xxv] — Sarah Anderson, Counter Punch [xxv] William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2014.”

“The issue is important because it tends to conflict with a hugely influential study published in 2017, called The Rate of Return on Everything, by Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor. This was a mightily ambitious piece of financial archaeology covering 17 countries, and it rendered the startling result that housing performed virtually as well as equities over time, but with much less volatility. The result held true for every country that Jorda and his colleagues examined.” — John Authers, Bloomberg

“I believe they mostly got this right. Just before President Biden took office, I presented some thoughts on what a rescue plan should include to deal with the macroeconomic challenges of the pandemic. I emphasized four broad areas: public health spending, enhanced unemployment benefits, assistance to state and local governments, and so-called “stimulus checks” to households. The legislation the president has signed does a pretty good job in all four areas.” — Sara Savat, Washington University News Room

“Hedge fund managers are torpedoing chances for a successful Green New Deal, according to Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In her recent article “Meet the “New Koch Brothers” – the Hedge Fund Activists Wrecking America’s Green New Deal“, she talks about how corporate raiders are turning the direction of “green” corporate partners of battery development, software, wind turbines, and more away from long term energy conservation projects toward short-term money-making projects to increase the hedge fund shareholder returns.” — WORT 89.9 FM

“Hedge fund managers are torpedoing chances for a successful Green New Deal, according to Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In her recent article “Meet the “New Koch Brothers” – the Hedge Fund Activists Wrecking America’s Green New Deal“, she talks about how corporate raiders are turning the direction of “green” corporate partners of battery development, software, wind turbines, and more away from long term energy conservation projects toward short-term money-making projects to increase the hedge fund shareholder returns.” — WORT 89.9 FM

It is an attitude typical of conventional economists that sees the claim to qualify as technicians who deal with “social engineering”, on the basis of a “true” economic theory. Disrespectful of the epistemological (i.e. research methods) and even ontological principles (concerning the conception of the world). — Riccardo D’Orsi, Econopoly …. Citation: Lawson, T. (2010). Really Reorienting Modern Economics . Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), April 10.

“And what if there is a stock buyback during the period the share price is inflated? Does that harm shareholders because the company is spending money to repurchase its stock, or does it actually further benefit them by potentially raising earnings per share (EPS)?” … Citation: William Lazonick, The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost and How It Can Be Regained, 36 Seattle U. L. Rev. 857, 859 (2013) (noting that trillions of dollars are spent on share buybacks and that “corporate executives who make these decisions are themselves prime beneficiaries of this focus on rising stock prices as a the measure of corporate performance”)

The Political Movement That Dared Not Speak its Own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure Philip Mirowski [Institute for New Economic Thinking, August 2014] ….consider the question: how should we approach the construction of a reliable history of a group of intellectuals who have managed to turn their meditations into a political movement on a global scale? Of course this raises timeworn problems of the relationship between theory and practice; but the Neoliberal case sports a further thorny complication: while we can fairly comprehensively identify the roster of whom should be acknowledged as a part of the movement, at least from its beginnings in the 1930s until the recent past, we are confronted with the fact that, in public, they themselves roundly deny the existence of any such well-defined thought collective, and stridently denounce the label of Neoliberalism. Not only do they wash their hands of most of the documented activities of the Neoliberal Thought Collective – think of Hayek and Friedman and their denials concerning the Pinochet interlude in Chile— but their plaint is that their opponents the socialists have always gotten the better of them, and thus their political project has never enjoyed any real successes, ever, anywhere, contrary to all evidence brought to the table. They are forever the bridesmaid of conservative parties, never the bride, to hear them tell it. Given the sheer numbers of people involved, and the really astronomical sums of money, and the cultural dominance of the airwaves, this sad sack victimhood is really quite remarkable, and itself calls for serious examination. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a political movement that dare not speak its own name has intellectual contradictions that it dare not air openly.