Updates

  1. Melissa Hathaway’s INET article is featured in Inside Cybersecurity

    May 19, 2021

    “[T]he U.S. Department of Justice should determine and make clear that paying a ransom is illegal,” Hathaway said in an article posted May 13 by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. “This step would likely force organizations to further invest in their security and ability to withstand and recover from an incident (i.e., increase their resilience). Categorizing ransom payment as an illegal activity would also clearly remove coverage for these types of payments from insurance policies,” Hathaway wrote.” — Charlie Mitchell, Inside Cybersecurity

  2. INET Working Paper on the consolidation of the dairy industry is cited in Homeland Security Today

    May 17, 2021

    “Larger dairy farms inevitably mean a system less geographically dispersed, larger environmental challenges with farm waste, and a less resilient system. The Institute for New Economic Thinking detailed these impacts in a recent report on the pandemic’s effects on dairy farmers, Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation: “The COVID-19 pandemic led to the collapse in commercial demand as restaurants, caterers, schools and other institutional customers were forced to close. Dairy plants serving supermarkets and grocery stores were already operating at close to full capacity when the coronavirus struck. Capital equipment specialized to produce for commercial customers were incapable of producing for consumers served by supermarkets or food banks. Some farmers had no choice but to dump milk.”[9] For the smaller dairy farmers, international (primarily Canadian) competition and price fluctuations are daily economic challenges.” — Charles Luke, Homeland Security Today … [9] Eileen Appelbaum and Jared Gaby-Biegle, “Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation,” Institute for Economic and Policy Research, August 15, 2020, https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_134-Appelbaum-and-Gaby-Biegel.pdf

  3. INET Working Paper on the non-inflationary effects of unemployment reductions is cited in The Worker

    May 17, 2021

    “Among those contributions, recent works highlight the deep, radical revision of axioms considered cystic: that hysteresis, the permanence of high unemployment rates over time, is a basic condition to keep inflation under control. Professors Walter Paternesi, Davide Roamniello and Antonella Stirati have empirically demonstrated that this thesis is not permanent and that long-term unemployment can be reversed without a significant spike in inflation (https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research- papers / on-the-non-inflationary-effects-of-long-term-unemployment-reductions). Another flagship of themainstream that can fall apart.” — Carles Manera, The Worker

  4. Bloomberg Quint covers INET's Law, Economics & Policy Conference

    May 17, 2021

    “The former ambassadors were speaking on a panel discussion at the law economics policy conference titled “Strategic Patience and flexible policies: How India can rise to the China challenge” and organized by INET.” — BQ Desk, Bloomberg Quint

  5. YSI member and INET intern, Atanas Pekanov is appointed acting Deputy Prime Minister for the EFM

    May 12, 2021

    “The new acting Deputy Prime Minister for EU funds is called Atanas Pekanov. The young expert, who recently turned 30, is an economist at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, Austria, and a lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). … Member of the Young Researchers Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Darik

  6. Thomas Ferguson is quoted in Rabble on money in politics

    May 12, 2021

    “Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has documented how U.S. big business interests poured money into local and state elections to ensure positive support for their largely unpopular policies. What Ferguson calls “political investment” is the practice of spending serious sums on party competition to keep hand-picked, docile representatives in power.” — Duncan Cameron, Rabble

  7. Arjun Jayadev article in the Hindustan Times describes what is needed to quickly roll the distribution of vaccines in India

    May 10, 2021

    “Pandemic management will also have to overcome the knotty issue of political economy. The blame game between the Union and state governments over an essential commodity such as oxygen is visible in court proceedings. We need a transparent mechanism that is perceived to be fair and trusted by all the stakeholders. Apart from dealing with the allocation of vaccines and other essential medical supplies such as oxygen, this body could suggest the financing pattern for sharing the expenditure on Covid management, including vaccine procurement. … Far too many lives have been lost to Covid. But as a challenge to India (and to humanity), it is certainly not an impossible task to manage the pandemic. But this can only happen effectively with cooperation, coordination, empathy, humility and scientific knowledge. It is not too late.” — Arjun Jayadev, Hindustan Times

  8. Daily Kos features Lynn Parramore's interview on CounterSpin

    May 9, 2021

    “Just now read this fascinating interview by Janine Jackson of fair.org (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) with Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking on how hedge fund managers are damaging American companies by pushing company managements to do stock buybacks. Basically, stock buybacks force up the price of a stock, allowing shareholders to make megabucks when they sell. Such buybacks were difficult until the Reagan administration loosened the regulations in 1982. Why are stock buybacks bad ? Because they divert money from research, from new investments and innovation, and from raising wages. The interview with Lynn Parramore goes into the details.” — Daily Kos

  9. Joseph Stiglitz and Anton Korinek’s INET-funded research is cited in the NY Times

    May 5, 2021

    “In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future. Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.” — Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times

  10. NPR features INET Working Paper on the racial and gender inequality of the pandemic

    May 4, 2021

    “Researchers involved in a new study from Washington University say women could be in trouble financially for years to come because of significant job losses during the crisis. “We have to be somewhat concerned that the larger inequality effects of the current crisis could have these persistent impacts on wages and on career progress in all the groups that are disproportionately affected,” said Steven Fazzari, a professor of economics and sociology at Wash U who co-authored the study.” — Andrea Y. Henderson, St. Louis Public Radio NPR

  11. The NY Times cites INET’s report from the Commission on Global Economic Transformation

    May 3, 2021

    “Yet notable critics like Joseph Stiglitz and Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, see woefully insufficient production by Western drug companies as a major roadblock to universal vaccination.” — Walden Bello, New York Times

  12. INET's article on the dangers of reopening schools is featured in the Santa Fe New Mexican

    May 1, 2021

    “Right after the CDC made this announcement, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, sent a letter to the Biden administration, citing a study by the Institute for Economic Thinking. … The authors of the study are Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, who did much of the research for the study and is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist and senior lecturer at the William Harvey Research Institute in London; Dr. Phillip Alveldi, CEO and chairman of Brain Works Foundry Inc, a U.S.-based developer of artificial intelligence-enhanced health care technologies and services; and Thomas Ferguson, the director of research projects for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Dennis Donohue, Santa Fe New Mexican

  13. Lynn Parramore appeared on CounterSpin to discuss her INET article on hedge fund’s blocking green initiatives

    Apr 30, 2021

    “Polluting companies tell us every day how they’re invested in the future; we’ve heard corporations en masse say, “Profits, what? We’re all about the people now!” There’s a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they’re-the-solution that we can see through, but there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes. We’ll talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.” — CounterSpin

  14. Arjun Jayadev appeared on Chayakkada Chats podcast to discuss vaccine equity

    Apr 30, 2021

    “Today joined by Dr Arjun Jayadev, who is a Professor of Economics at the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. He was previously Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also closely involved with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I speak to him about the basic links between IPRs and the pandemic; the long-held orthodoxy in economic theory on the importance of IPRs, especially in areas like health; how IPRs lead to suboptimalities like hoarding of knowledge, vaccine grabs and other global inequalities; the relationship between public funding and vaccine production; whether private profits being produced from public investments; and finally, the problem of vaccine nationalism.” — Chayakkada Chats

  15. Project Syndicate cites INET’s report from the Commission on Global Economic Transformation

    Apr 30, 2021

    “To do this properly, we need to understand the structure of markets for knowledge-based products like new vaccines. Currently, we do not: the “market” is a mishmash of competition and side deals. According to a recent paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, governments and pharmaceutical companies last year concluded 44 bilateral COVID-19 vaccine deals, many of which have undisclosed details and poorly understood escape clauses. Poor countries were, by and large, left out.” — Kaushik Basu, Project Syndicate