Archive

“Texas’ leaders knew as of 2011 … when the state went through a short severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather,” wrote James K. Galbraith, of the University of Texas at Austin, in the Institute for New Economic Thinking. “But they did nothing,” he wrote. “To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time.” That’s what happens when the private sector calls the shots. Money first.” — Richard Gross, Counterpunch

“Economic opportunity was further restricted by individual and institutionalized racism and political disenfranchisement. Discrimination in hiring by employers and intimidation of black workers through violence placed black workers at a direct disadvantage in the labor market,” Trevon Logan Peter Temin wrote in “Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration,” a working paper written for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Coastal Review

Single-family home-ownership—elusive for many today—is an aspiration we ought to abandon

Does the COVID recession still have the potential to turn into a broader financial meltdown?

The IPCC was correct in emphasizing the need for early mitigation, but their analysis of possible growth trajectories appears to be faulty.

“We’re building a data system, because you can’t really manage a city if you don’t know who’s there and what’s in it.”

Legal scholar Dina Srinivasan talks to INET’s Lynn Parramore about restoring fairness to a regulatory Wild West.

Texas’s electricity market “reforms” made the current crisis inevitable

Labor-saving advances in AI may undo the gains from globalization and pose new challenges for economic development

Labor-saving advances in AI may undo the gains from globalization and pose new challenges for economic development

Revival of failed austerity policies of the past is simply not an option

“That Italy is “lazy to reform” is probably one of the most widespread myths - and has little to do with reality. In 2015, for example, the OECD rated Italy’s reform efforts as significantly higher than those of Germany and France. The Dutch economist Servaas Storm takes the same line. In an in-depth study, he found that Italian politics as a whole adhered much more closely to the (market-liberal) economic policy guidelines of the EU than Germany and France.” — Phillip Heimberger & Nikolaus Kowall, Makronom

James K. Galbraith slams “unreliable” report claiming that raising the minimum wage would reduce jobs

“The Biden administration must put a high enough price on carbon pollution to encourage the scale and urgency of action needed to meet the commitments it has made to Americans and the rest of the world. The future of our planet depends on it” — Nicholas Stern & Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

— European