Rethinking the Economy

OK, so I’m really not 21 years old anymore: I pushed my hands too hard, and now I need to give them a serious break. I’ll be back in about two weeks.

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At this weeks’s annual gathering of professional economists, there was a panel on “the political economy of the US debt and deficits.” Aside from Alan Blinder, the panelists – all prominent economists – nattered on about how deficits were destroying the country, we need to cut Social Security and Medicare, etc. At the end of [...]

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At some point I will start writing again in complete sentences and paragraphs. But right now I’m better off doing little brain dumps. Here are the pieces/principles that make up “We Have More Power to Create a Just Economy Than We Think We Do.”

1) Everyone Should Have a Real Say
Best way to ensure economy works [...]

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Ron Paul and other conservatives have been arguing that Keynesian-style stimulating the economy is a waste of money – so much of what we buy is made overseas that we don’t get much bang for the buck. Is that true? Paul Krugman says no:
Barry Ritholtz sends us to a San Francisco Fed paper from last [...]

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Here’s the latest attempt to sum up my framework:
Question:
If our economy isn’t “natural” and wasn’t inevitable, then what? What is the alternative that would actually work?
Answer:
We have more power to create a just economy than we think we do – but only if we embrace the limits of our power.
OR
We have more power than [...]

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Another nice example of how to do a protest with style, courtesy of the fabulous boys and girls of SF Pride at Work:
Here’s a little more about SF Pride at Work:
San Francisco Pride at Work is an organization of queers for economic and social justice. We are the LGBTQ arm of the [...]

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Once upon a time, there was a company called Sears. Many years ago ago – 1989 to be precise – it threatened to dump Princess Illinois and run off with another state unless it was given a tidy sum ($170 million). Princess Illinois forked over the dough, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land. [...]

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After hearing a talk by civil rights veteran Robert Moses about the possibility of transforming the DC school system using a similar style of community organizing to the one he and other SNCC members used in the Mississippi Delta, I’ve been reading a book he cowrote, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the [...]

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At the end of 2011, the Congressional Research Service put out a report on whether the gap between the rich and everyone else was shrinking or growing. The bottom line:
Inflation-adjusted average after-tax income grew by 25% between 1996 and 2006 (the last year for which individual income tax data is publicly available). This [...]

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Over the holiday break, I ended up watching two very interesting videos from the March founding conference of the Southern Grassroots Economy Project. According to their website:
SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on [...]

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