Rethinking the Economy

When I finished Version 0.17 of my model, I realized that I needed a bucket for holding the complexities behind “everyone should have a real say.” Turns out to be a bit more complicated than I thought. So, here’s a dump of the pieces that I think should end up in this bucket.

 
Consumer choice versus [...]

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The Guardian’s Elliott Ross has been mucking around in Big Pharma’s never-ending quest to make sure that research is slanted their way. It isn’t pretty.
When doctors are deciding which drug to prescribe a patient, the idea behind evidence-based medicine is that they inform their thinking by consulting scientific literature. To a great extent, this [...]

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Great article in the Huffington Post about the epic battle in DC between retailer lobbyists and bank lobbyists over the fee retailers pay when you use your credit card. My favorite quote:
One frustrated moderate Democratic senator asks to remain anonymous so he can speak freely about his legislative education. “I’m surprised at how much [...]

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Exhibit A of why passing good policy isn’t enough, courtesy of Think Progress:
According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, the banks’ spending on lobbying in the first quarter of 2011 was actually higher than it was in the first quarter of 2010, when Dodd-Frank was actively being debated:
Wall Street and the financial [...]

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Going after players like the Chamber of Commerce is a good idea for greens. But, says Grist’s Dave Roberts, how about also rattling some Dem’s cages?
It would be a terrible mistake for climate hawks to abandon the top-down/money field of battle and decamp entirely to People Politics…. The problem is that greens have [...]

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A little more than a year ago, I wrote a snarky post about Bill McKibben’s plans for 350.org; it didn’t seem like he had a real analysis of power or a real game plan. A year and a quarter later, it’s a different story. 350.org has merged with 1Sky and Naomi Klein [...]

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It’s time, says Robert Reich, to drop a Top Hat on the corruption spewed by the market:
In the words of lobbyist Lauren Maddox, “The policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.”
The answer is not necessarily found in broader or stricter “ethics rules” barring specific gifts to politicians. Such rules may have [...]

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According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:
The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. [...]

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Normally I’m too cynical to get pissed off when I read the news. But reading about how Wall Street’s looting local taxpayers made me so furious I’ve been stewing over how we let ourselves get so screwed. What would’ve happened if Obama had cut a tougher deal right at the start?
Take the bailout of [...]

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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 [...]

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