Rethinking the Economy

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 in the States, we lefties often pine for the wonderful social democracies Europe has. So one of the most striking things about the Euro Crisis has been the absence of a powerful left response. There have been riots in the streets, marches, protests, mass civil disobedience, and strikes.. But that’s what we are reduced [...]

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This just in: engineers are pissed off enough that they are calling politicians on their shit around the climate crisis (hat tip to Jess Zimmerman):
The technology needed to cut the world’s greenhouse gas emissions by 85% by 2050 already exists, according to a joint statement by eleven of the world’s largest engineering [...]

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On Sunday, Kamal Abbas, general coordinator of the independent Egyptian Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS) and all-around bad ass, sent Michael Moore a video clip supporting his union brothers and sisters protesting at the Wisconsin State Capitol. As I was reading the transcript, one thing blew me away:
No one [...]

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Very cool news courtesy of the Wall Street Journal :
The United Auto Workers union said it is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a bid to organize employees, including a new push for hourly factory workers at foreign-owned car plants in the U.S.
The effort is part of a major shift in [...]

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The American Prospect has an interesting series of articles on how CWA, the Steelworkers, SIEU, and other US unions have been reaching out to European unions for help in organizing. You may not realize it, but if there’s a school bus that gets your kid to school, or there’s a security [...]

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A few weeks ago, BusinessWeek ran a piece by Intel founder Andy Grove about how to create more jobs in the US. I held off reading it; I wasn’t interested in another diatribe about how we need to cut taxes on big business, create more “labor flexibility” by destroying unions, and general give Corporate [...]

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I heard an interview with Steve Hill, author of Europe’s Promise, in which he said Germany’s new chancellor Merkel, is in favor of the German policy that pushes companies to reduce the number of hours employees work rather than laying them off. A little Googling and voila, a NYT description of Merkel’s [...]

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[Part 3 of Values-based vs. Market-based Approaches to the Economy]
As we saw yesterday, the strongest argument for a market-based framework is that it allows for decentralized, flexible, creative solutions vs. what Krugman calls “a ‘command and control’ fix that issues specific instructions in the form of regulations.”
That’s the theory. But step [...]

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When two feet of snow slowed DC life to a crawl last week, I started catching up on old New Yorker’s. In an interesting December article on China’s “crash program for clean energy,” one paragraph caught my eye:
[a] message is gaining currency in Congress; it frames American leadership as manifesting not so much [...]

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