Rethinking the Economy

I’ve been looking for a phrase to capture a particularly bizarre piece of behavior — when people who want to cut the government complain about the government not doing enough. I think I’m going to call it Pulling a Brady, in honor of representative Kevin Brady of Texas. From the Wall Street Journal a [...]

[Read more →]

Engineer Jan L. A.van de Snepscheut said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” (p.9)
That’s one of the main points of a terrific new book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, by Auden Schendler. Schendler is the executive director [...]

[Read more →]

How do you do smart, funny progressive propaganda? Like this:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell
And that’s pretty damn impressive considering how hard it’s becoming to parody insurance companies.
Take the letter America’s Health Insurance Plans’ President and CEO Karen Ignagni sent to Max Baucus. Among other requests, Think Progress explains, the insurance [...]

[Read more →]

While playing around with the new rules metaphor, I realized it’s also time to replace one of my favorites: Stack the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys. I really like juxtaposing stacking the deck with good guys. But there’s a problem with that metaphor — control.
According to Wikipedia:
The term originated from the magician’s [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been struggling with the RTE model’s central metaphor — the economy as ecosystem. Morgensen’s bizarrely optimistic proposal is a good example of why I think I need another metaphor.
The ecosystem metaphor’s got a lot going for it. It’s very rich and evocative. It’s also got a lot of room for being playful — [...]

[Read more →]

What happens when an economic model can’t straightforwardly deal with the role of power in the economy? You get bizarre ideas like the one presented in the New York Times.
Gretchen Morgenson, one of the smartest business writers around, asks what we’re going to do about the financial regulators who completely failed us.
Even though calamitous [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been reading Dean Baker’s The Conservative Nanny State, which, in between joyfully slapping conservatives upside the head, wrestles with how to talk about the relationship between government and market.
Here’s Baker’s basic argument:
the nanny state conservatives have been incredibly successful in structuring the political debate over the last quarter century. They [...]

[Read more →]

As we’ve seen, Big Pharma’s very sophisticated in how they pollute the info doctors and patients have take decisions about drugs. Food manufacturers? Not so much.
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, is “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter [...]

[Read more →]

Aside from being truly appalling, the subject of last week’s post is a great example of how traditional economic models don’t work. To recap via the New York Times:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their [...]

[Read more →]

Monday’s post explored how Big Pharma ghostwrites articles for doctors to promote their drugs. Universities, the AMA — they’re all basically do what they can to avoid seriously dealing with this crisis in medical ethics. Guess who’s decided to step in? Senator Charles Obama-wants-death-panels, “the government is a predator not a competitor” Grassley.
Grassley [...]

[Read more →]