Archive

“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

“It’s interesting he [Josephus Daniels] may not have been the most die-hard racist, but he just saw that racism is how you win elections. I think we see echoes of that today. I think it’s also notable to recall that this is the only successful insurrection on U.S soil in U.S history. People started finding out a little bit about it when the capital siege occurred because people started asking, “has an insurrection ever happened?” Actually the answer is yes, and it would be Wilmington. It’s the only time this has ever happened to a municipal government and it was the state that allowed this to happen, allowed these militias to run amok. It was the state that was really responsible at the end of the day for this violence. And there have never been any reparations of any kind even though there are people living in Wilmington today who can who can say, “my ancestor owned this plot of land that was taken.” They’ve never had any reparations. If it was a white person that could prove that, I think we would be talking about justice. But it mirrors the Tulsa situation, it was the success of black people that was the problem. Not this idea of inferiority which had been the racial mythology. it was actually the fact that black people had persevered and were very successful even in the face of all of this oppression.” ….It’s just happened time and time again in Wilmington, Tulsa, Detroit, elsewhere, that the American dream has just been incredibly elusive for black Americans through absolutely no fault of their own. What I think is pretty clearly structural racism.”— Lynn Parramore

Canadian economist Mario Seccareccia, recipient of this year’s John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics, says it’s time to reconsider the idea of full employment. He spoke to Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking about why 2021 offers a rare opportunity to rebalance the economy in favor of Main Street.

Watch INET at the Trento Economics Festival online

Why do patriarchal systems survive? What is missing in how economics relates to the concepts of identity and power?

By Stefano Sannino Secretary-General, European External Action Service (EEAS), Jutta Urpilainen EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, European Commission, Rohinton P. Medhora President, The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Andrew Michael Spence Nobel Laureate of Economics, Co-Chair, Commission on Global Economic Transformation, Jayati Ghosh Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Andrea Renda (moderator) Senior Research Fellow, Head of GRID Unit, CEPS

How do we break free of the cycle of restrictive thinking which has plagued economics, and the world?