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Robert Johnson, the head of the progressive Institute for New Economic Thinking, calls the Biden task force a “real good group.” But he then asked: “What power will they really have … after the power of money bends the best designs in a self-interested direction?”

By fully utilizing the power of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), President Biden could take meaningful steps to keep workers safe during the pandemic, even without Congress’s help

“Dina Srinivasan, a fellow with the Thurman Project at Yale University, noted how Google’s dominance in both search and display advertising are interrelated. Google’s power in the search market is not irrelevant to the advertising business, she noted in a recent academic paper.” — Ronan Shields

“The role of money in US politics is fundamental. A recent updating of earlier research, released by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, confirms that the views of the top decile of the population largely determine policy. The inevitable frustrations of the rest give the parties their passionate voting blocs.” — Martin Wolf

Some nations have embraced new technologies, while others seem ill-prepared. What accounts for this difference?

When segregationists fought against school integration, libertarian economist James Buchanan saw an opportunity for his private education plan

“Their new working paper, just published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York, gives a rigorously technical analysis of what these tools reveal, and the Institute’s research director, Thomas Ferguson, has helpfully fashioned an introduction to — and a historical context for — the McGuire-Delahunt analysis that lay readers will find easily accessible. Ferguson, himself a pioneer in social science research on political decision making, points out that “the idea that public opinion powers at least the broad direction of public policy in formally democratic countries like the United States has been an article of faith in both political science and public economics for generations.” —Sam Pizzigati

“Conveniently for present purposes, Naked Capitalism posted a piece by political scientist Thomas Ferguson on the determinants of political decision making— that is, on the ‘product’ that elected representatives produce. The punchline: ‘money,’ as defined by the interests of corporate executives and oligarchs, is the overwhelming determinant of ‘political’ outcomes. Advancing the public will— the liberal explanation; or the public interest, the explanation offered for representative democracy, have no bearing. The longstanding practice of fitting political outcomes into these theoretical frames to ‘explain’ public policies is scientific malpractice given Mr. Ferguson’s findings.” —- Rob Urie

“It looks as if Joe Biden will win a very tight electoral college victory against arguably the worst president in history in the midst of a deadly pandemic and crippled economy the incumbent has bungled disastrously. How could this election even be close? ROB JOHNSON, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), and I talk about how we got here and what it’s going to take to move forward. As long as both parties depend on Wall Street and the 1% for funding, our real challenges - climate change, restoring the middle class, healthcare, systemic racism, etc.- will never truly be dealt with.” —- Terrence McNally

What are the 100 most pertinent economic questions facing our global societ?

William Lazonick, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, who has devoted much of his research to the topic of buybacks, has written that the rule change “in effect gave corporations license to use open-market repurchases to manipulate the market.” … In an interview, Lazonick told Retail Dive, “These distributions to shareholders, particularly buybacks on top of dividends, are at the expense of keeping people employed, rewarding them for the work they’ve done, and investing in new products and processes.”

New INET research shows once again that it’s large firms and the 1%—not the “median voter”—who drive U.S. policy

“Third, U.S. taxpayers foot a huge portion of the bill for basic science leading to new drugs. The National Institutes of Health is the single largest source of biomedical research in the world. In fact, NIH funding contributed to research associated with every single new drug approved by the FDA from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion according to a recent report.”

In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning.

In this interview, Dr. Vera Songwe, economist and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa reflects on the ways that African governments have handled COVID-19, the role of the Continental Free Trade Agreement in turbo-charging future growth, the vital role of infrastructural investment and mobilising domestic resources for building forward better and greener.