New Order - Regret

tax reform

Tax reform is stupid. Here's how to make it smart. by Ryan Cooper

Piketty

Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? by Marshall Steinbaum

UBI

The case for and against a universal basic income in the United States by Byrd Pinkerton and Sarah Kliff

Stiglitz

Lessons from the Anti-Globalists by Joseph Stiglitz

The lesson of all of this is something that Scandinavian countries learned long ago. The region’s small countries understood that openness was the key to rapid economic growth and prosperity. But if they were to remain open and democratic, their citizens had to be convinced that significant segments of society would not be left behind. 

The welfare state thus became integral to the success of the Scandinavian countries. They understood that the only sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity. It is a lesson that the US and the rest of Europe must now learn.

universal basic income

No Strings Attached by Ioana Marinescu

Democrats

The Democratic Party Is a Ghost by JACOB BACHARACH

Robots, retraining and solutions by De Costa

Robots are going to take a lot of jobs — here's what we could do about it by Pedro da Costa

Gillbrand, Sawicky on taxes

The Shape-Shifter by BRANKO MARCETIC

How would a populist tax? (Spoiler alert: not like Trump) by Max B. Sawicky

Blade Runner 2049 trailer 10.6.17

Larry Summers on Yellen, flat Phillips Curve

Less is more when it comes to Federal Reserve policy by Larry Summers

Flat Phills, all around by Jared Bernstein

unionization drive at colleges

 The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis

" A unionization drive at Vanderbilt University shows how austerity in higher education is hurting educators and students."

Wren-Lewis: rightwing populism, economic determinism

Why are the UK and US more vulnerable to right wing populism? by Simon Wren-Lewis

It seems to me that these various explanations are quite compatible with each other. Where what we might call neoliberal policies had been strong - weak unions, declining welfare state, stagnant wages - these policies created a very large group in society that were looking for someone to blame. In a managed economy that allowed the parties of the right either to use nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric to deflect blame from themselves, or for the far right to capture those parties. As that rhetoric also hit out at globalisation it potentially was a direct threat to global business interests, but those interests could either do nothing about this or felt they could manage that threat.

Krugman on the EU

What’s the Matter With Europe? by Paul Krugman

Which brings me back to the French election. We should be terrified at the possibility of a Le Pen victory. But we should also be worried that a Macron victory will be taken by Brussels and Berlin to mean that Brexit was an aberration, that European voters can always be intimidated into going along with what their betters say is necessary. 

So let’s be clear: Even if the worst is avoided this Sunday, all the European elite will get is a time-limited chance to mend its ways.

Dean Baker on economists

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-wrongest-profession-baker

The Wrongest Profession by Dean Baker

March 2017

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In the mid-1990s, all the great minds in the field agreed that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6 percent without triggering spiraling inflation. It turns out that the unemployment rate could fall to 4 percent as a year-round average in 2000, with no visible uptick in the inflation rate.

As the stock bubble that drove the late 1990s boom was already collapsing, leading lights in Washington were debating whether we risked paying off the national debt too quickly. The recession following the collapse of the stock bubble took care of this problem, as the gigantic projected surpluses quickly turned to deficits. The labor market pain from the collapse of this bubble was both unpredicted and largely overlooked, even in retrospect. While the recession officially ended in November 2001, we didn’t start creating jobs again until the fall of 2003. And we didn’t get back the jobs we lost in the downturn until January 2005. At the time, it was the longest period without net job creation since the Great Depression.

When the labor market did finally begin to recover, it was on the back of the housing bubble. Even though the evidence of a bubble in the housing sector was plainly visible, as were the junk loans that fueled it, folks like me who warned of an impending housing collapse were laughed at for not appreciating the wonders of modern finance. After the bubble burst and the financial crisis shook the banking system to its foundations, the great minds of the profession were near unanimous in predicting a robust recovery. Stimulus was at best an accelerant for the impatient, most mainstream economists agreed—not an essential ingredient of a lasting recovery.

While the banks got all manner of subsidies in the form of loans and guarantees at below-market interest rates, all in the name of avoiding a second Great Depression, underwater homeowners were treated no better than the workers waiting for a labor market recovery. The Obama administration felt it was important for homeowners, unlike the bankers, to suffer the consequences of their actions. In fact, white-collar criminals got a holiday in honor of the financial crisis; on the watch of the Obama Justice Department, only a piddling number of bankers would face prosecution for criminal actions connected with the bubble.

There was a similar story outside the United States, as the International Monetary Fund, along with the European Central Bank and the European Union, imposed austerity when stimulus was clearly needed. As a result, southern Europe is still far from recovery. Even after another decade on their current course, many southern European countries will fall short of their 2007 levels of income. The situation looks even worse for the bottom half of the income distribution in Greece, Spain, and Portugal.

Even the great progress for the world’s poor touted in the famous “elephant graph” turns out to be largely illusory. If China is removed from the sample, the performance of the rest of the developing world since 1988 looks rather mediocre. While the pain of working people in wealthy countries is acute, they are not alone. Outside of China, people in the developing world have little to show for the economic growth of the last three and a half decades. As for China itself, the gains of its huge population are real, but the country certainly did not follow Washington’s model of deficit-slashing, bubble-driven policies for developing countries.

In this economic climate, it’s not surprising that a racist, xenophobic, misogynist demagogue like Donald Trump could succeed in politics, as right-wing populists have throughout the wealthy world. While his platform may be incoherent, Trump at least promised the return of good-paying jobs. Insofar as Clinton and other Democrats offered an agenda for economic progress for American workers, hardly anyone heard it. And to those who did, it sounded like more of the same.

basic income

Straw men in the debate on basic income versus targeting by Martin Ravallion