Archive

An excerpt from the just released book, The Outlier, by Kai Bird

“Moreover, too little government spending can increase company bankruptcies and lead to less investment in research and development, hurting the supply side of our economies — potentially exacerbating inflationary pressures. The EU has gone through a decade of demand stagnation, performing well below its productive potential. Inflationary forces of the 1970s are no longer intact, not least because of declining labour bargaining power, changing demographics, high inequality and private debt overhang. Without concerted fiscal expansion to scale-up investment and protect the vulnerable, aggregate demand will remain low and standards of living will stagnate. Instead of fetishising fiscal discipline, we should prioritise more important social, economic and environmental outcomes — like creating well-paid green jobs, lifting millions out of poverty and implementing green infrastructure projects.” — From Frank van Lerven and others, Financial Times

“Well, 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 and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.” — Noam Chomsky in an interview with Jacobin

What That Means For Biden’s Inflation Policy Trilemma

How do we move fiscal policy from part of the problem to part of the solution?

Is Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose adage “lending freely against good collateral at a penalty rate” has been gospel for central bankers, still relevant in a post-Great Financial Crisis world?

“Overcoming the COVID-19 crisis and ensuring a rapid and equitable economic recovery are only two of the challenges we must meet in 2021. This year will also be a crucial one for achieving the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.” — Project Syndicate

Is Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose adage “lending freely against good collateral at a penalty rate” has been gospel for central bankers, still relevant in a post-Great Financial Crisis world?

“Last year, Weil and his former top adviser, Tanya Goldman, spoke with Law360 about their “concentric circles” model, laid out in a recent working paper published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. They propose a three-tiered system that starts with a set of core rights linked to all types of work, like basic protections against unsafe conditions, discrimination and harassment, and nonpayment. The second tier of rights includes things like collective bargaining, and access to workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, which businesses would have to provide unless they could affirmatively prove that their workers aren’t employees. The outermost tier of rights seeks to make benefits portable for workers facing uncertainty.” — Mike LaSusa, Law 360

“What is the real meaning of the return of the state in a world that after the pandemic starts a boom in the technology sector with the advantages and risks that this entails? The response of the Nobel laureate in economics Michael Spence during the discussion with Robert Johnson, president of Inet (Institute for New Economic Thinking) was clear: “I believe that the return of the Statto means many things. The state is very important for social protection, to remedy the failures of the market. There will be changes in the models of globalization but people think about the state and not about globalization. And the state must be able to respond to citizens’ expectations.” And in the face of what Johnson called “growing political despair” ( even as Biden has made progress in restoring confidence in citizens after the inequalities caused by the pandemic ), a new political class is needed.” -L’Adigetto

The governance of technology is a new challenge. The Recovery Plans is encouraging the digital transformation of our economies. An acceleration of technological change is bound to deeply affect labor markets and income distribution. While labor-market adaptation is likely to stave off permanent high unemployment, it cannot be counted on to prevent a sharp rise in inequality.

The world won’t emerge from the pandemic until the pandemic is controlled everywhere, and this is a special concern because of the new mutations that are likely to arise where the disease is running its course. So too, the world won’t have a robust economic recovery until at least most of the world is on the course to prosperity. Global growth is far more muted now than then, and inward-looking policies in some of the nations where growth has been restored have resulted in an increase in their trade surplus, attenuating the global impact of their recovery.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.

Melissa Hathaway joined NPR to discuss cybersecurity and the growing threat of ransomware attacks.

“How talented is the right? Maybe not so much. The late Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom, author of the 1977 book Politics and Markets (and onetime American Political Science Association president), would have told Giridharadas that in a capitalist economy, business elites enjoy a “privileged” position. This position does not always align with party, but it alters the field of play. Lindblom’s position is backed by others. Thomas Ferguson wrote about the investment theory of politics in 1990s. In the past decade, Ben Page of Northwestern has covered similar ground.” — Steve Dubb, Nonprofit Quarterly