Archive

Many indicators say the US is close to full employment: Hours of work tell a different story.

How Investor-owned Physician Practices Are Driving up Healthcare Costs

A Comment on Summers and Stansbury

Why Pushing on a String Has Never Worked

Summers and Stansbury Get It Half Right

An except from Galbraith’s review of Paul Davidson’s Who’s Afraid of John Maynard Keynes? Challenging Economic Governance in an Age of Growing Inequality

An update from INET’s Young Scholars Initiative

Author Supritha Rajan argues that self-interested competition may be the official line, but it’s far from the whole story

Inadequate demand and climate change require a global green new deal

Economists like to say they’re immune from ideological influence. Our research shows the opposite.

INET’s grantees and Commission on Global Economic Transformation are looking at artificial intelligence and society.

Economist James K. Boyce explains how to fight climate change and rising income inequality in one shot

The central goal of any serious climate policy is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The central question is how.

The Chicago School has long used bankrupt assumptions to strangle antitrust policy

Political risk—and what firms do about it

It was too good to be true: Another effort to vindicate austerity falls victim to flawed methodology.

Andrea Gabor, author of “After the Education Wars,” discusses how California is pushing back on millionaire-driven charter schools. Will the rest of the America follow?

The idea that businesses are run to maximize profits for shareholders is just plain wrong, says William Lazonick

With journalism moving from a stable to a precarious profession, digital media workers have become some of the most organized in the startup world

Frequent civil conflicts in African countries may erode national identity, thus highlighting a reason why civil conflict is costly for growth and development

As the maladies of modern capitalism have multiplied, fundamental questions about the future of the world’s dominant economic model have become impossible to ignore. But in the absence of viable alternatives, the question is how to reform a system that is increasingly at odds with democracy.

By promoting unrealisitc models, economists have become part of problem rather than the solution

There is not one opioid crisis in America—there are many. And supply-focused measures won’t stop them.

Ben Power, who adapted the play “The Lehman Trilogy,” talks about the eponymous family’s role in the creation and destruction of American wealth

How free electricity could fight climate change and inequality

Returns on wealth exceed growth for more countries, more years, and more dramatically than Piketty has found

The state has long used law to back private money—with dire consequences, then and now

For all the talk of Modern Monetary Theory representing a brave new frontier, it is easy to forget that the United States has gone down this road before, when the US Federal Reserve financed the war effort in the 1940s. Then, as now, the question is not about government debt, but about the debt’s purpose and justification.

A collection of our research on populism, globalization and nationalism

One of America’s leading socialists discusses how a collectively owned economy would be structured, the limits of the welfare state, and what Keynes understood that Marx didn’t

Everyone is waking up to the fact that estimates of what is possible in the economy are way off: this paper explains why

The Chicago School’s weakening of antitrust law hurt the economy

Modern Monetary Theory is problematic. Launching large scale fiscal programs that rely on it would be skating on thin ice.

“Facebook is undermining our country, our democracy.”

Low interest rate policy can only do so much to bring the relief to American borrowers that they deserve: past monetary policies, credit market regulations and stagnant labor productivity growth all get in the way. Interest rate policy activism is part of the problem, not the solution.

Facebook engaged in an elaborate bait and switch on user data: Privacy disappeared when competition did. Laws governing competition could change that.

Italy’s austerity-fueled crisis is a warning to the Eurozone

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.

At a G20 preparatory meeting in Berlin, an INET panel analyzed how governments can prevent banks from exploiting taxpayer-funded bailout guarantees

Kristen Ghodsee discusses her research on how love and relationships function under socialism and capitalism, and what economists miss about the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe

INET talks to Jayati Ghosh and Marina Della Giusta

During her long career she illuminated many of the shortcomings of neoclassicism, and offered alternative paths

Modern monetary theorists ignore how their policies could hurt developing countries

Richard Vague looks at what it’ll take for the U.S. to win the R&D race

The most popular political philosopher of his generation on liberal responsibility worldwide for the rise of the hard right

As technology and deregulation continue to shape the labor market, maintaining strong worker protections is as important as ever

Economists should stop pretending to be scientists and go back to the core of the discipline—as a field of inquiry and way of thinking

As young scholars, we have formulated a new plan for fostering diversity in both identity and scholarly thinking in economics—preconditions for academic rigor.

INET talks to Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, Claudia Goldin, and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo

US counties with prison labor often have lower wage and employment growth

The heterodox scholar was a fierce critic of neoclassical economics. But she also insisted that economics be driven by science, not ideology.

INET’s President introduces a new research program that challenges orthodox assumptions about the limits of economic knowledge

Author Samuel Stein talks about how capitalism shapes housing and what economists have in common with city planners

The field of economics is aggressively sexist and biased against new and unconventional ideas. Revelations about gender and ethnic discrimination show the need to reorient the whole system toward more freedom, respect, openness, and pluralism. But how?

For women discussing economics, it’s still easier to be seen than heard

Decades before it caught on with other economists, Sadie Alexander was the first economist to recommend a government jobs guarantee in the US

We need to ban stock buybacks, while building a movement for basic economic rights

Pharmaceutical pushers like Purdue “couldn’t have done their dirty work” without America’s increasingly unbalanced economy

John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 1973 that establishment economics had become the “invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public.” If anything, economists’ embrace of that role has grown stronger since then.

Asset markets are indispensable in harnessing society’s diverse views and insights about future business performance. But those views are shaped as much by emotion and crowd mentality as by rational expectations.

Economic distress in rural areas and opioid exposure in cities are key indicators of overdose deaths

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

Journalist Andrea Gabor’s new book heralds a “quiet revolution” in education you didn’t know was happening

Central bankers pursue a “neutral” rate that doesn’t exist

U.S. GDP accounting underestimates intangible capital, overstates financial capital, and is all but oblivious to the the erosion of human and social capital. A serious growth slowdown is coming.

Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have insisted that tax records are better for measuring inequality than income surveys. They’re wrong.

America’s new “philanthrocapitalists” are enabling social problems rather than solving them

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

Hope for mitigating climate catastrophe may not be lost, but the scale of political change needed is no cause for optimism

A response to economists who doubt our capacity to decarbonize while maintaining robust growth

Market tweaks and incentives won’t save us from climate catastrophe. Only radical policy change will.

The new IPCC Report is overly optimistic about global productivity growth and fossil fuel energy use. More dramatic, immediate action is needed

A new report shows an economically viable path to net-zero CO2 emissions in key industries by 2060

Prejudice and collusion, not simply research quality, drive journal citations

Until 2008, rising home values gave the middle class a cushion amid growing income inequality. But following the financial crisis, that wealth has failed to return.

Instead of rewarding the taxpayers and employees who actually create value for the tech giant, Apple is doling out massive stock buybacks

António Guterres and CGET Commissioners discuss cooperating on inequality, climate change, multilateralism, and more

Adolph Reed, who researches race and politics, warns that “identitarian” politics can conceal the structural inequities of capitalism

Conventional wisdom asserts that American politics is becoming more and more tribal. But the chiefs of the tribes share a lot in common: dependence on big money.

Contrary to the dominant media narrative, social issues like racism and sexism on their own can’t explain Trump’s success.

The current international monetary system is costly, unfair, and risky. “Economic nationalism” and deregulation in the U.S. will make it worse. A multilateral alternative is needed.

To connect across difference is the only thing that will save us from rule by the privileged few.

William Lazonick has shown how the doctrine of “shareholder value” has hurt wages in the United States. But in Latin America, where family corporations dominate, the story is more complicated.

Reactions to the size of the proposed plan rely on discredited assumptions and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of economic growth—and austerity 

Economists who dismiss inequality as a problem secondary to poverty miss the point: Inequality is part of what drives poverty

Getting published in a top five economics journal is a near-requirement for tenure. But it’s a poor measure of research quality within a system that punishes creativity.

Ten years after the crisis, financial regulation leaves taxpayers holding the bag for banks’ safety net.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist and the second-most-famous democratic socialist in America sit down together

After Sweden’s elections, a look at how immigration and economics explain a political puzzle

Back in 2008, a critical opportunity was missed when the burden of post-crisis adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors. The result was not only prolonged stagnation, but also the Republican Party’s embrace of demagogic populism and the election of Donald Trump.

A financial industry safety net enriches bankers and their shareholders — at our expense

Ten years after Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the Wall Street casino is running amok

Distracted by the perceived threat of a Chinese savings glut, mainstream macroeconomists missed the writing on the wall of the 2008 crisis

Both before 2008 and today, there’s a disturbing tendency in Washington to not take mortgage fraud seriously

Despite disparate policy beliefs, MMT and orthodox macro rely on many of the same theoretical foundations

In Europe and the United States, stock-based compensation discourages long-term corporate sustainability

Ten years ago, the financial crisis washed away faith and trust in economics as a guide to social prosperity. Filling a void is difficult. We are still hard at work. 

When a small group of companies can dominate a labor market, wages—and workers—suffer

Expanding, rather than cutting, Social Security is the solution

It’s not just Turkey­—from India to Indonesia, external financial liabilities are a looming threat