Debt and Deficit Delusions
The United States is confronted with numerous threats to its economic well-being and security. The national debt is not one of them. The real challenges of our time are massive joblessness and the decrepit state of American infrastructure. {…}
The Politics of Inequality
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson Simon and Shuster, 2010, 357 pp. TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO, in the midst of economic collapse, it … {…}
The Broken Economy
Two and a half years after the recession started, Wall Street executives are once again collecting billions in bonuses, businesses are flush with cash, but most of America is still hurting. After a growth spurt at the end of last … {…}
It’s Still the Economy
The recession that started in December 2007 was already in its ninth month when a tumultuous ten days in September 2008 shook the world. First the U.S. government nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; then the investment banking house Merrill … {…}
The Economic Collapse
In the fall of 2008, a little more than a year after the Bank for International Settlements (a Switzerland-based organization that fosters cooperation between central banks) warned that “years of loose monetary policy have fuelled a giant credit bubble, leaving … {…}
The ‘Usefully Dangerous’ Economist
This is the story of two economists—John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year at age ninety-seven, and Paul Krugman, who at fifty-four is in his prime as an economist and a columnist for the New York Times. Like Galbraith, Krugman … {…}
Robert Heilbroner 1919-2005
“Whatever Dissent‘s problems,” Irving Howe once said to me in the 1980s, “we at least have two of the most literate economists alive.” He was referring to Robert Lekachman and Robert Heilbroner. Bob Heilbroner was a man of prodigious energy. … {…}
Bush’s Budget Lunacy
In The Right Man, a memoir of his experience as a speechwriter in the Bush White House, David Frum claims that after September 11, “There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda. … {…}
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Unfair Hike: Brazilians Protest Rising Public Transit Costs· June 18, 2013 ·
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Partial Readings: Whistleblowers and Job Security· June 17, 2013 ·
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Belabored Podcast #10: Whose Walmart?· June 14, 2013 ·
