Author Archives: acivilamericandebate

Because I will be leaving town for five days tomorrow, I must preview my next post in my “Finding a New Macro economics” series (with the promise to finish it next Thursday and Friday, providing a fuller discussion and appropriate … Continue reading →

“The backlash from hell” – Bass Resources (here) The discovery of an error in an influential research paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has sparked an academic firestorm. It’s time to sort through the wreckage. – Betsey Stevenson and … Continue reading →

Economics has been under fire since the recent crisis for enshrining abstract models that offer little connection to the real world. In “Growth in a Time of Debt,” our data-intensive approach aims at providing stylised facts, well beyond selective anecdotal … Continue reading →

During the Great Depression, to his credit, Keynes bucked his colleagues by claiming that government spending could revive a depressed economy. But, caught in the neoclassical paradigm, he got the mechanism wrong. Keynes argued, as does Krugman today, that the … Continue reading →

The academic economics profession ought to have been most intimately involved in analyzing and debating a broken capitalist system whose deep crisis had confounded all its confident expectations. It has done nothing of the sort. Instead it proceeds as if … Continue reading →

Fairness requires that people who make more money pay a higher portion of their incomes in taxes than people with less money. That’s called a progressive tax system, and it’s been a foundation stone of America’s tax code. [1] – Robert … Continue reading →

We scarcely have time to congratulate ourselves on [the victory of market economics over socialism] before confronting failures like the growing concentration of economic power, growing inequality of income and especially wealth, stagnant or falling real wage rates, homelessness and … Continue reading →

The Growth of U.S. Income Inequality The United States has the highest level of income inequality among wealthy nations, and the highest level of correlated health and social problems, both by wide margins. [1] This status was achieved by the … Continue reading →

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes. – John Maynard Keynes [1]    It was late in 2010 … Continue reading →