Just do the math
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes:
The means of most Americans haven’t kept up with what the economy could and should provide. The economy is twice as large as it was three decades ago, and yet the typical American is earning about the same, adjusted for inflation.
Read more here.
Chomsky on student debt
From a wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky:
[O]ne of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country.
Read Chomsky’s breakdown of the rich-country-indebted-student paradox here.
Student debt hits the fan
Jason Sattler writes that Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking a good question:
Why does the government give the big banks a better deal than it gives students?
It’s question so perfect that people can’t stop talking about it.
The first standalone bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would not only prevent student loan rates from doubling, it would cut them down to the same rate the Fed charges banks to borrow money overnight for the next 12 months. And the idea has taken off like wildfire, with more than 400,000 people signing on to support the legislation.
Read more here.
The ghost in the economy’s attic
Econ4’s Gerald Friedman writes:
Even while scholarship has exposed the fallacy of austerity economics and this news has reached wide audiences through Twitter and the Colbert Report, the United States government is embracing austerity’s policy prescriptions… The ghost of bad austerity economics continues to haunt, and even to drive, the living.
Read his piece here.
Austerity’s emperors have no clothes
Stephen Colbert skewers the Harvard economists whose flawed research underpins austerity politics:
Check out Colbert’s interview with UMass-Amherst economics graduate student Thomas Herndon, who showed that austerity’s emperors have no clothes:
Austerity fiasco
The revelation by UMass-Amherst researchers that a key Harvard study used to support austerity economics was based on sloppy (mis)use of data has created a sensation in the media and the economics profession. Paul Krugman explains the selling power of junk economics:
The intellectual edifice of austerity economics rests largely on two academic papers that were seized on by policy makers, without ever having been properly vetted, because they said what the Very Serious People wanted to hear.
Read Krugman’s piece here.
Read a brief summary by UMass economists here.
See links to media coverage here.
Who’s got the world’s wealth?
The world’s richest 300 people have as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion:
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU
The great foreclosure folly
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has released an ebook based on testimony from whistleblowers at Bank of America and PNC on the whitewash more formally known as the Independent Foreclosure Reviews. You can download the pdf here.
Read more about the book here.
Straight talk about the next American revolution
Advance praise for What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution (Chelsea Green, April 2013), by Econ4’s Gar Alperovitz:
“Gar Alperovitz’s new book is so plain-spoken and accessible that it takes a moment to appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment. After examining new patterns of positive change emerging in America today—including many undernoticed changes that involve democratizing the ownership of wealth—he develops a brilliant strategy for the type of transformative change that can lead America from decline to rebirth. In giving a sense of strategic direction and honest possibility to the call for a new economy, Alperovitz has made an enormous contribution exactly where it is most needed.”
—James Gustave Speth, author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy“In this important new book, Gar Alperovitz is telling us there’s something happening here in corporate-driven America, be it social enterprise, community land trusts, worker-owned businesses, or employee stock ownership plans. We all know that the free-market economic system no longer works for the vast majority of citizens and Alperovitz is showing us that there is a better, equally American way, to spread the wealth and put more people to work, while making the nation a safer and healthier place to live. This is not an utopian fantasy or a call for social engineering, but a plain-spoken and easy-to-absorb analysis by one of our leading economists of what’s gone wrong and how to make it better.”
—Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
Redefining the problem: the corporate predator state
Katrina van den Heuvel writes in The Washington Post:
True conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition.
Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington.
Read her piece here.
