Archive

Incomes Destroyed at the Bottom, Profits Supported at the Top

William Lazonick emphasizes that keeping workers productively employed is key to economic recovery from Covid-19 as well as a healthy economic future

As we face a coronavirus-induced health and economic crisis of uncertain duration, policy makers should be particularly concerned about private equity’s heightened use of debt to buy out healthcare providers and take them private, with no regulatory oversight.

It’s time for business executives, employees, and taxpayers to come together to help get us out of the pandemic and create conditions for a sustainable and equitable future

If the public is to be called upon for the second time in twelve years to bail out businesses, it should get something back for its money. Bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government.

The younger generation, already saddled with student debt and uncertain jobs, will pay a high price as the crisis unfolds.

If the European Central Bank does not jump to the aid of peripheral countries weakened by the pandemic, the Eurozone could collapse.

Establishing legal responsibility in the fissured workplace

Economist and feminist Victoria Bateman reveals some naked truths about the failings of economics.

A report from the Commission on Global Economic Transformation’s meeting in West Africa

Some Personal Reflections on a Half Century of Friendship and Appreciation

Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now, not just in the far future.

Lower Income Towns in New Hampshire Voted Heavily for Sanders; Richer Towns Did the Opposite.

Jonathan Haidt deploys insights from moral psychology to help us see ourselves and each other more clearly

How models treat innovation may be just as important as their assumptions about climate damages

The central bank today is not just the government’s bank, but also a bankers’ bank, a truly hybrid institution

How Penrosian Learning Confronts the Neoclassical Fallacy

Without new economic thinking, macro policy will retain its deflationary biases and secular stagnation remains the ‘normal’.

Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow laws and the Great Migration

The AEA and the Crisis of Expertise

On the Modern Economic Theory of Incentives, Markets, and Socialism

In an economic context that remains uncertain, the biggest loser of the UK elections may well be our health and that of the environment.

The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object?

A critique of Mankiw’s Macroeconomics

One thing is clear – the ‘get Brexit done’ slogan resonated in a country which had been living on a series of knife edges as one ‘crunch’ time after another came and went.

Brexit uncertainty has already taken an economic toll

Many of the challenges facing the new EU Presidency will need to be addressed not only at the European level but within a reinvigorated multilateral framework.

In her new book, Don’t Be Evil, Rana Foroohar explores how to confront companies like Google and their under-regulated stampede over all of us.

Pharmaceutical drugs are often a matter of life or death. It should be a prime objective of government policy to rid the industry of financialization.

Repeat after me: How much pipe should Fed plumbers lay if Fed plumbers like to lay pipe?

The U.S. economy is increasingly becoming a dual economy, where high productivity sectors—such as manufacturing—and high pay sectors—such as finance and professional services—co-exist with low pay and low productivity sectors that employ most workers.

Political theorist Wendy Brown explores new threats to democracy and society

To make start-ups work for everyone, we need to put power back in the hands of workers.

National States and Conflicting Economic Priorities in the Making of the European Monetary System

Trying to predict the financial future is a fool’s errand, even for a genius

Policy hype but vintage fiscal economics from Godley, Lerner, and Keynes

Big Tech companies are swallowing up nascent competitors. Why aren’t regulators paying attention?

Author Jeremy Lent argues that western conceptual frameworks with roots in the Stone Age push us towards disaster. Time to let them go?

New research shows how citation metrics create perverse incentives for corruption in economics

Summers and Stansbury mark a dramatic shift from New Keynesian orthodoxy, but only make it halfway to understanding the demand-driven nature of stagnant growth

Mott walks us through answers many careful readers of Kalecki, Keynes, Steindl, and Minsky knew all along.

An update from the meeting of the Commission on Global Economic Transformation (CGET) in Cape Town

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