This is an excellent interview in which Hedges discusses Monbiot’s new book The Invisible Doctrine. As a result of this interview, I read the book and found it likewise excellent.[1]

The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 05:00

“The three pillars of capitalism—commodified labor, commodified land, and commodified money—all came together simultaneously. And they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor, with unprecedented speed,... [More]”

Lina KhanI’ve heard the argument that Lina Khan at the FTC is really good and making good guidelines. Fair enough. She’s not an elected official. She could work for any administration. The argument is, of course, that Trump wouldn’t hire her, so we therefore need to get Biden or Harris back in there, so that she can continue her good work. This is ridiculous. We have to put up with Biden or Harris so we can have a working FTC? That’s the argument?

That’s getting toward the bottom of the barrel of the... [More]

The article Bidenomics and Its Discontents by James Galbraith (Scheer Post) is from April but discusses several structural issues with the economy that persist today and many of which have become even more severe, despite simultaneously being desperately papered over by the song-and-dance of the markets and an administration interested in the economy sinking only after November 5th.

Wages rising; hours sinking

“Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs. If one earner loses a... [More]”

The article Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily) writes,

“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about... [More]”

The article Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: ‘The State Is Not the Solution’ by Katarina Hall (Reason) start off with this sentence,

“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.”

Talk about red meat for Reason magazine. I’ve been following this magazine for a while and I appreciate some of their content, but man they just can’t resist this bullshit. This obvious... [More]

The article Does Capitalism Beat Charity? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) does some decent analysis on the efficacy of the market mechanism for distributing societal benefits versus that of charity.

“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to... [More]”

The article Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes,

“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”

I like me some Dean Baker. I disagree with him occasionally. This is one of those times because I wonder whether he’s not painting with... [More]

I read an article somewhere—I can no longer find the link that inspired this note—that said that you need an app in order to charge your electric car to make sure you pay for the electricity. If you don’t have cell service or wireless, then you can’t charge. The author was somewhere in Tennessee—I believe outside Knoxville, near the Smokies—where there was no reception. He couldn’t charge his vehicle with the standard chargers. The article went on to explain how to use the emergency kit... [More]

BidenomicsThe article Should People be Happy About the Biden Economy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) answers its own question with “yes.” I’m not so convinced, as I explain in my responses below. Baker’s analysis and my critique of it is several weeks old at this point, but it’s still applicable.

More recently, Paul Krugman has jumped on the bandwagon, accusing anyone who thinks that the economy sucks—only because it seems to suck for themselves personally—off supporting Putin. Baker doesn’t go that far, but he does swerve a lot... [More]

The following ~10-minute video presents a thesis on why malls in the U.S. are dying out whereas malls in Europe are still going strong.

Why US Malls Are Dying (And Why European Malls Aren't) by Adam Something (YouTube)

1. Purchasing power has increased in Europe, while the U.S. has allowed entire swaths of the country to drop precipitously—e.g., the Rust Belt, The Appalachians, The Rural South, and even large parts of the West Coast.
2. The U.S. absolutely drowned the market in oversupply, with e.g., 10x as much commercial space per capita than Germany. Europe generally has... [More]

DuoLingo is teaching my partner and I something about neoliberal capitalism.

She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at all to stay there. Sometimes I do one lesson a day for a couple, three days in a row. No biggie. No demotion. Nobody’s working too hard in my chapter of the Diamond League.

My partner, on the other... [More]

The United States is the absolute king of searching for ways in which you can suck just enough of the enjoyment out of doing something that it creates the most profit without alienating people to the degree that they stop paying for it.

That’s the topic of the article Perfidious Pricing by Michael Bateman (Passing Time), which deals with a practice he says is called Drip Pricing. I suppose it’s what the inventors deem to be a clever way of describing a process whereby, instead of being presented with a single price, the... [More]

The article Robert Reich Is Wrong: ‘Corporate Greed’ Isn’t To Blame for Egg Prices by Joe Lancaster (Reason) lays out all of its information, then comes to the wrong conclusion. Once again, people, revenue != profits. A corporation only very grudgingly declares profits. It must pay taxes on profits. Therefore, it looks for every single possible way to squirrel away profits into different parts of the ledger.

The article is about an over 100% increase in the price of eggs from January to December of 2022. My anecdotal... [More]

White-collar crime that sucks billions from millions of poor people is exactly the kind of violence that our societies tend to ignore. The guy stealing $40 from a 7–11 is where the focus lies. People are trained to care about the latter—increase the police!—and trained to ignore the former. Crime continues to be a huge concern—and there is crime, don’t get me wrong. There were just shots fired in a central parking lot in the small village where my family lives. Weird things are... [More]

The comic Explaining Capitalism to Aliens by Corey Mohler shows a top-hatted capitalist explaining our economy to two, much-taller, blue aliens with tentacles for arms and two extra tentacles extending from their ribcages. Their physiognomy isn’t relevant to the story, but that’s what they look like.

“Alien: “Explain to us: how do you decide how to allocate resources, and who does what work, on Earth?”

“Human: “So you see, on Earth we have a free market, so resources are efficiently allocated to meet the... [More]”

I recently read the article Stop Trying To Create a Zero-Risk Society by Veronique de Rugy (Reason), which included the following infuriating citation.

“Yet, as economist Steve Horowitz recently wrote to me on Facebook, “The reality is that we can never achieve” a zero-risk society, and “the costs of trying to are enormous, in terms of both material resources and human freedom.””

Honestly, just fucking knock it off. Nobody wants a zero-risk society. We just want to maybe not have a high-risk society because all the fucking... [More]

The article ECB to accelerate supply of ultra-cheap money by Nick Beams (WSWS) describes the main reason the U.S.—and the world—economy doesn’t seem to have noticed any downside in the last year and a half, despite the most devastating pandemic in living memory.

“It seems that whatever the state of the economy, the response of central banks is the same: pour more money into the financial system, so that investors and speculators can continue to make vast profits on the basis of ultra-low interest rates.

“When... [More]”

The video below is an interesting and worthwhile financial, political, and COVID analysis that includes both Europe and the U.S.

If There’s No Fear of Inflation, Why is GOP Against More Stimulus? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth (YouTube)

At 17:54, Rana Foroohar spoke about the difficulty of doing anything big because any of the people with enough free time and energy to actually move the needle on how our society works in any significant way have been conveniently captured in it because they are heavily invested in it. They would have to literally put a decent dent in their (relatively) ample... [More]

The article A Gilead-Remdesivir Fix: The Ten Percent Solution by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) points out that it is absolutely not difficult to fix the so-called problem with remdesivir. It’s a short article, so I’ll just cite it in full, highlighting the most salient bits for those who need a tl;dr for a four-paragraph article.

“The Washington Post had an excellent piece documenting how the government put up most of the money for developing remdesivir, a drug that now offers the hope of being the first effective treatment... [More]”

The interactive side-scroller Wealth shown to scale by Matt Korostoff is an article that shows just how much money the 400 richest Americans (the .0001%) have—and what could be done with a relatively small fraction of it (e.g. use 6% to “refund all taxes for households earning under $80,000”).

Pro tip: Show the source of the page to read it without all of the scrolling.

You scroll horizontally along a nearly endlessly long page that discusses excessive wealth and the good it could do were it to be distributed.... [More]

I sometimes wonder what my younger self would think of what he’s become. I like to think that I’ve avoided a disappointed reaction, but it’s hard to say because I’ve always been a bit “judgey”. At the very least, there are several things I couldn’t have predicted. One is that I actually have a list of favorite economists. 20-year-old me couldn’t have imagined that in a million years.

In no particular order,

Dean Baker

He’s the founder of CEPR, the voice of sanity and national treasure of... [More]

The article How to Survive End Times by Ted Rall (CounterPunch) discusses what kind of people are needed once society collapses or changes significantly, based on experience in Afghanistan.

“You make yourself useful in a failed state exactly the opposite of how you do in ours. In the United States in 2020, it pays to have excellent skills in one or two areas, to be the best at what you do in your specialty. Not in Afghanistan in 2000. Dangerous places work best for people who are renaissance men and women, those with a... [More]”

The article Mark Zuckerberg is a Rich Jerk by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) takes issue with the media’s love affair with plumbing the depths of billionaires’ minds.[1]

“It is bizarre that so many people look to the country’s billionaires to tell us how the world should be constructed or think that these people have any great insight into such matters. Being a billionaire means that you were successful at getting very rich. There is no reason to believe that billionaires have any more insight into major policy issues than... [More]”

The article America’s largest milk producer files for bankruptcy (CNN) spends a few useless paragraphs discussing America’s growing predilection for “milk alternatives” before finishing with the following paragraph:

“That’s not the only problem Dean Foods has faced. Walmart (WMT), which was one of Dean Food’s biggest customers, dropped them last year after building its own dairy plant.”

So, oat-milk sales being up is the lede and the world’s largest company having dropped Dean as a vendor is just an... [More]

I spotted the following citation in Notre Dame Cathedral will never be the same, but it can be rebuilt by Kiona N. Smith (Ars Technica):

“In a statement, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron vowed to the rebuild the cathedral, beginning with a national donation program to raise funds for the effort.”

Did Macron just suggest using GoFundMe to fund the rebuilding of Notre Dame? Is France not collecting taxes anymore?

The following citations are from an interesting talk/paper, Testimony for the Hearing of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Community Affairs On “Exploring the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Ecosystem” by Nouriel Roubini in October 2018 (U.S. Senate Banking Committee) (sub-titled: Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database).

He had good foresight in 2007, but I’m surprised to see how confident he is about the current system in that... [More]

Poor Dean Baker often writes about the same problems—topics that he’s discussed in detail and for which he’s provided solutions in his book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He’s a national treasure.

Once more, though, from the top. His brief post Thomas Friedman Shows Us Why Democracy is Facing Huge Problems by Dean Baker (CEPR) makes the following points (all emphases added).[1]

Patents

“Bill Gates is not incredibly rich because of rapid... [More]”

I last wrote about Mark Blyth about two months ago in the article Mark Blyth on Global Trumpism. I recently saw another interview with him on the Jimmy Dore show that I can recommend watching.

If you’ve watched Blythe before, he doesn’t cover a lot of new ground, but he does have a wonderful way with words and for getting right to the point. Often he can shut down an entire line of reasoning with a single, giant point that makes other arguments pale into insignificance.

The interview is split... [More]

The article US pulls out of Trans-Pacific Partnership by David Kravets (Ars Technica) isn’t very long or filled with detail, but it looks like the TPP is dead. Trump made good on the one promise of his that I actually approved of.

The TPP was a deal negotiated in secret, encompassed over 2000 pages and was written (and probably read) almost exclusively by lobbyists for giant multinationals and patent/copyright holders. The former were hoping to be able to extract rent from signers that passed laws that could be shown to... [More]

I just read/scanned through the article Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture. The article is quite accurate and well-written in the material that it addresses. The reaction at Reddit was more uninformed than usual. My notes below.

• Taxes: Federal and even cantonal (state) taxes are lower in Switzerland. As she mentioned, this is partially due to there being no “capital-gains loophole” (dividends are taxed at a high rate) but also because there are fewer... [More]