Rethinking the Economy

So far, most economic models have shown that cutting greenhouse gas emissions will reduce growth, but only by a little. But a study commissioned by the German government argues that it could actually increase GDP — and not just by a little.
Increasing the EU’s 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target from 20% to 30% could [...]

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Yesterday’s loss in Wisconsin was a real blow, although the folks in Wisconsin and their supporters around the country did a damn good job of fighting back. Now they’re gearing up for the next battle. Their immediate target: recall the jackasses who voted for it.
I’m glad they’re aggressively going for recalling these [...]

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[Part 2 of the Creating Good Jobs series]
Last week we saw the idea that the government can’t help create jobs by “picking winners and losers” is just a myth. This week, an article in Inc magazine will help knock down another big myth.
According to Inc, Norway rocks:
Rates of start-up creation here are among the [...]

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[Part 1 of the Creating Good Jobs series]
Conventional wisdom tells us that if we want to create good jobs, the first thing we should do is drop the idea of interfering in the market by picking “winners and losers.” In 2007, Gene Sperling — who was the National Economic Adviser to the last Democratic president [...]

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Now that I’ve got a list of questions my framework should be able to answer, I’m going to start with the first: how do we create good jobs?
It’s a big topic, so I’m going to write a series of posts that try to combine pieces of my framework to come up with a first [...]

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On Daily Kos, brooklynbadboy writes about a fascinating German program for the unemployed: Der Gründungszuschuss.
Der Gründungszuschuss roughly translates into “start-up grant.” It is a program for the unemployed that gives a monthly amount of seed capital for those on unemployment. The grant is means-tested and is paid on top of unemployment, health and [...]

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Some folks have argued that given the Republican’s Obama-must-fail strategy and the Conservadems desire to punish working families, there’s no way Obama could have prevented the economy from going off the cliff. Brad DeLong has published a great, depressing talk that’s a center-liberal economist perspective on what Obama could’ve done despite these obstacles.
Although [...]

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Another smart, quick Dean Baker smackdown:
The NYT Doesn’t Know That We Have 15 Million People Unemployed
That is the only thing that readers can conclude from its heroic efforts to balance the budget in 2030. This exercise is utterly mind-boggling. We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up [...]

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It feels like I’m getting close to having the right pieces for my framework. Where I’m still really struggling is gluing them together. So, I’ve been playing around with a new way of an intro for my framework that riffs off of Demos/Topos’ Promoting Broad Prosperity. Here’s the longer version:

The middle class is in trouble [...]

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For a long time, many economists and free-market cheerleaders have argued that raising the minimum wage hurts the workers it’s supposed to help. Back in the mid-90s, David Card and Alan Krueger did a brilliant study comparing fast food workers in certain counties in New Jersey versus Pennsylvania to show that increasing the minimum wage [...]

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