INET in the News

“A recent study by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, painting a wider picture, shows that the effective reduction in emissions due to carbon pricing policy comes to between just 1 and 2.5 percent of the total.” — Ornaldo Gjergji, Osservatorio

“Panics are not needed for banking crises to have severe economic consequences,” says Emil Verner, the MIT professor who helped lead the study. “But when panics do occur, those tend to be the most severe episodes. Panics are an important amplification mechanism for banking crises, but not a necessary condition.” Indeed, in an ambitious piece of research, spanning 46 countries and going back to 1870, the study surveys banking crises that occurred with and without panics. When there is a panic and bank run, the research finds, a 30 percent decline in banking-sector equity predicts a 3.4 percent drop in real GDP (gross domestic product adjusted for inflation) after three years. But even without any creditor panic, a 30 percent decline in bank equity predicts a 2.7 percent drop in real GDP after three years.” — Peter Dizikes, MIT News

“Consider the following point made by Institute for New Economic Thinking executive director Rob Johnson during a recent interview when asked about Medicare for All: “Public opinion polls show more than 70 percent of the population is in favor of Medicare for All. It’s not the population that doesn’t want it, and they’re the ultimate voters. It’s vested interests and the struggle that has to do with the relationship between money-raising campaign war chests and the probability of re-election and what you might call the refractory influence of the mainstream media, where pharmaceutical companies in particular and insurance companies as well are very big advertisers.” — Luke Savage, Jacobin

“In taking over industrial companies, financial managers focus on the short run, because their salary and bonuses are based on current year’s performance. The “performance” in question is stock market performance. Stock prices have largely become independent from sales volume and profits, now that they are enhanced by corporations typically paying out some 92 percent of their revenue in dividends and stock buybacks.[6]” — Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism [6]William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity:Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off,”Harvard Business Review, September 2014. And more recently, Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored(Oxford: 2020).

“in addition to the author’s interpretations, there will also be a considerable list of texts and contributions that can be useful for approaching and deepening the economic debate and the developments of the alternative and post-Keynesian theoretical approach, even in its various currents. . The not obvious presence in the public debate of these topics makes the book an important reading in order to interpret the recent economic history of our country starting from the questions that the crisis triggered by the outbreak of the pandemic and the recipes prepared by the European and national institutions pose us. , of which however no shadow is seen in political decisions, having an interpretative key that escapes the mainstream logic is, even more so in this context, of crucial importance.” — Davide Romaniello, Sinistrainrete

“One place to look always is where’s the money? Who funds congress? Actually, there’s a very fine careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues in politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study about a year ago a careful study in which they investigated a simple question, “what’s the correlation over the years many years between campaign funding and electability to congress?” It’s almost a straight line, it’s the kind of close correlation that you barely get in the social sciences. The greater the funding, the higher the electability. You can find a few cases here and there that aren’t right on the line, but from the standpoint of social science it’s a remarkable correlation.” — Noam Chomsky, Jacobin

“What I’d really like to see going forward is some sort of vision which is inclusive and forward-looking in the medium and long term about all these kinds of aspects welfare; health, education, environment. In the past, we’ve had a situation when we’ve looked at other countries which have made this transition to more advanced economies. They have always had some element of industrial policy thinking through how they actually going to shift their populations from low-productivity to high-productivity. Currently, I think we’re doing things with a hope and a prayer. Our growth models have fizzled out so far. What we’re looking for is something in the next three to five years which will be aimed at re-opening new markets, more inclusion, and really ensuring the wealth of a much much larger fraction of the population than we are currently doing.” — Arjun Jayadev, Bloomberg “Jayadev, a professor of economics at Azim Premji University, said India has returned home this year after decades of failure in providing access to quality health care for a large part of the population. If there is a silver lining, then the crisis will give the country a chance to “build better,” in the words of Jaydev. This includes at least three elements – an environment that is closely linked to health outcomes, with a medium-term plan to keep health and education spending at a consistently high level. – aimed at improving the quality of the environment and, finally, committed to support. one-third of these elements are something similar to a city employment program. The budget could also help immediately by universalizing the PDS and supporting revenues through direct remittances, Jayadev said. “Overall, short-term relief and long-term structural focus will help transition to a more inclusive and vital growth strategy that is missing in the current vision.” — Pallavi Nahata, Bloomberg

“One of the main reasons Italy’s economy is in such dire straits is its strict adherence to the EMU’s macroeconomic rule book — in particular the rules on fiscal austerity and structural reforms — as Dutch economist Servaas Storm painstakingly details in his article ‘Italy: How to Ruin a Country in Three Decades’” — Nick Corbishley, Naked Capitalism

“The gap between the “technology haves and have nots” in the corporate world is widening. A recent study also found that this gap is widening between rich countries and poor countries. When few companies have access to 3D printers, robots, or cutting-edge AI, there are fewer actors to leverage such technologies to the point at which productivity will increase across the board.” — Wim Naudé, The Conversation

“INET has supported a lot of brilliant academic work in areas such as Imperfect Knowledge Economics, financial regulation, human development, and environmental economics. Such research has helped to discredit the ideas – such as “perfect” competition, “efficient” markets, and “rational” expectations – that formed the ideological foundations for laissez-faire microeconomics, monetarist central banking, and irrational pre-Keynesian fiscal policy, especially in Europe. As such, it has done as much as INET’s other work – including policy research, academic community-building, and deepening collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and other official institutions – to end market fundamentalism’s intellectual monopoly.” — Anatole Kaletsky, Project Syndicate

“Best of Mankiw: Errors and Tangles in the World’s Best-Selling Economics Textbooks Peter Bofinger, former member of the German Council of Economic Experts [Naked Capitalism January 4, 2021] Mankiw has been lambasted a number of times by Adbusters, the Canadian group which originated the call for mass protests that became Occupy Wall Street. Also see Toxic Textbooks: “Mankiw’s textbook seems an ideal place to look for clues as to how both the economics profession and the public which it educates became so ignorant, misinformed and unobservant of how economies work in the real world.” The problem with the leadership of the Democratic Party at the state and national levels is not the caricature of maliciousness that the Trumpists believe, and which the Republicans have used to “feed red meat to their base,” but merely that the leadership has been taught, and believes and swills, the snake oil Mankiw peddles. Below, just a small sample of Bofinger’s detailed take-down of Mankiw.” — NB Books Community, Daily Kos

“To get into the mood for their [Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan] ideas, you can listen to the authors talk about them to my colleague Stephanie Flanders on the Stephanomics podcast, or this podcast from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, or this episode of The Sound of Economics podcast from the Bruegel Institute.” — John Authers, Bloomberg

“The landscape of EM has consolidated into a few corporate conglomerates, which are oligarchies with iron grips on contracts through noncompetitive or illegal collusions with large hospital systems in the form of kickbacks. (Institute for New Economic Thinking. March 15, 2020; https://bit.ly/34fLeMD.) This has effectively castrated any hope for independent practices to thrive and injected many wrongful consequences into EM.” — Rizvi, Saba MD, Emergency Medical News

“But to my surprise, The Atlantic article explained that MIT economist Peter Temin, in his book “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” not only delved into the contributing factors to poverty and economic inequality, he offered systemic solutions. This approach made the piece a must-read for me because at Gainesville for All, we’re all about finding systemic solutions to problems linked to race and poverty. Temin offered five proposals he believes can help tip the scales favorably for those stuck in the lower class.”— James F. Lawrence, Gainsville Sun

“When Texas and nine other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google last week, the complaint identified many of the same conflicts of interest as Ms. Srinivasan’s paper, Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets” in the Stanford Technology Law Review. The lawsuit said Google controlled every part of the digital advertising pipeline and used it to give priority to its own services, acting as “pitcher, batter and umpire, all at the same time.” … “Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant professor at the University of Utah’s economics department, wrote on Twitter that Ms. Srinivasan’s articles on Google and Facebook had a greater influence on the recently filed antitrust cases than all the other research about those companies or tech in general by traditional economists focused on competition policy.” — Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times