socialist-economics

  Henry Kissinger is gone, at 100 years. Some will mourn him, while others, including myself, preferred he face  judgement for crimes against humanity in Vietnam, Chile, and beyond, long ago. Judgement is a cultured expression for less dignified revenge. As Eastwood's "Unforgiven" hitman's revenge tale concludes: "We all got it comin'". But that may also be an evasion from deeper truths. Kissinger's rise to intellectual prominence, and eventually to power via the Rockefellers, among other energy interests, rested on a hash analysis of 19th Century "Great Power" conflicts.  I say hash, because it contained very little original thought, and furthermore, Kissinger was keenly aware that the intellectual framework's sole value was as a fungible  fraud to cover the real purpose of post war IS foreign policy -- namely, the removal or compromise of ALL obstacles to US Big Business --- aka "monopoly capitalism" --- expansion and domini...

ChatGPT-assisted summaries of recent blog posts by Michael Roberts, a UK Marxist economist. November 18, 2023 About Lenin In Disguise: He is Making a Comeback. From A Sahm Recession To Global Downturn Michael Roberts This article was originally published: November 12, 2023 The selected text discusses the current state of the US and global economies, highlighting potential risks and challenges they may face. It mentions differing opinions on whether the US will avoid a recession in the next 12 months, with William Dudley, former New York Fed chief, believing that the chances of a recession increase dramatically once the unemployment rate rises by a certain amount. Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist, has developed the Sahm rule, which accurately predicted r...

  "Just Transition" Challenges Arising from Tech Plus Progressive Agendas      At Least 30 Million Jobs seriously impacted Data from the BLS and American Community Survey, 2022. 1.  Artificial Intelligence: Our (OpenAI)  findings reveal that around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. These estimates were performed based on comparative scoring of high school and college students compared to GPT on a range of standardized tests, and and skill sets or tasks where GPT scoring could be trusted. U.S. civilian labor force seasonally adjusted 2021-2023In October 2023, the civilian labor force amounted to 167.73 million people in the United States. That computes roughly .8  x  167,730,000 x .1  + .5 X 167, 730,000 x .19 JOBS requiring a 'JUST TRANSITION' of    -- 13.4 MILLION JOBS PLUS 15....

  GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potentialof Large Language Models Abstract  We investigate the potential implications of large language models (LLMs), such as Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs), on the U.S. labor market, focusing on the increased capabilities arising from LLM-powered software compared to LLMs on their own. Using a new rubric, we assess occupations based on their alignment with LLM capabilities, integrating both human expertise and GPT-4 classifications. Our findings reveal that around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. We do not make predictions about the development or adoption timeline of such LLMs. The projected effects span all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure to LLM capabilities and LLM-powered software. Significantly, these impacts...

text only version: original:   It’s not officially over yet, but the United Auto Workers appear to have won a significant victory. The union, which began rolling strikes on Sept. 15, now has tentative agreements with Ford, Stellantis (which I still think of as Chrysler) and, finally, General Motors . All three agreements involve a roughly 25 percent wage increase over the next four and a half years, plus other significant concessions. Autoworkers are a much smaller share of the work force than they were in Detroit’s heyday, but they’re still a significant part of the economy. Furthermore, this apparent union victory follows on significant organized-labor wins in other industries in recent months, notably a big settlement with United Parcel Service , where the Teamsters represent more than 300,000 employees. And maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023 will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation. Some history you should know: Baby boomers like me grew u...

A High National Debt Can be Bad News, Sort of Like a High Stock Market Dean Baker    via Patreon The media have been giving considerable attention to the national debt in the last year or so. They have some cause, it has been rising rapidly, and more importantly, the interest burden of the debt has increased sharply since the Fed began raising rates last year. But, if we want to be serious, rather than just write scary headlines , we have to ask why the debt is a problem. The first concern to dispel is the idea that the country somehow has to pay off its debt. Our national debt is in dollars, which the government prints. Unless something truly bizarre happens, we will always be able to print the dollars needed to pay interest and principal on government bonds. We could have some story that if our economy collapses people could lose confidence in our debt. That is true, but a bit nuts. If our economy collapses, we should be worried about our economy collapsing, the ...

  Playing Games with GDP Numbers: China’s Growth Has Not Slowed to a Crawl Dean Baker, via Patreon GDP growth in the United States is always reported as an  annual rate. This means that if the economy grew 0.5 percent from the  first quarter to the second quarter, it would be universally reported as  2.0 percent growth, with reporters always giving the annual rate. This  is basically four times the quarterly rate. (It’s actually the first  quarter’s growth rate taken to the fourth power, but this will be the  same for small numbers.) This is a simple and obvious point. It is not something that is  debated among reporters or economists, it is just a standard that has  become universally accepted. Many other countries do not report their growth numbers as annual  rates. They report a quarter’s growth number at a quarterly rate. That  is fine, there is nothing that makes the use of an annual rate better,  the point is that everyo...

  Dean Baker -- via Patreon That line is effectively the conventional wisdom among people in  policy circles. If that seems absurd, then you need to think more about  how many politicians and intellectual types are approaching climate  change. Just this week ,  John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, was in China. He was  asking the Chinese government to move more quickly in reducing its  greenhouse gas emissions. President Xi told Kerry that China was not  going to move forward its current target, which is to start reducing  emissions by 2030. I know from Twitter that many people think that Kerry’s request was  reasonable and that Xi is jeopardizing the planet with his refusal to  move forward China’s schedule for emission reductions. This is in spite  of the fact that China is by far the world leader in wind energy, solar  energy, and electric cars and that all three are growing at double-digit  annual rates. T...

Enlighten Radio Podcasts: Labor Beat Radio: Is it Time for Single Payer? : Enlighten Radio Presents:   The Labor Beat Radio Podcast Broadcast LIVE, Tuesday, 9:00 AM Eastern, July 18, 2023 Hosts: John Case, JB ...

note: statistics were sparse before WWI, and the call up for WW Size of wc and prop of society 1913 and now before WWI labor data is very sparse and not considered accurate. The data below includes all occupations AND farming, both tenant and family farm operations There were 300,00 workers in the Horse and Buggy industry in 1900.  Virtually none 30 years later. 1910 total workforce -- 51 million in 1900 census 38,000,000 men 13 million women 51 million workers 1913 total population  97,225,000 2020 population  331,4 million           2020 workforce 149.8 million 1910 -- 2015 workforce division of labor graph comparison Notes on 1910 - 1915 data Comprehensive data by industry do not exist for 1915, but we have information for 1910 from the decennial census. Data from the 1910 Census show that 32 percent of nonfarm jobs were in manufacturing; in 2015, manufacturing accounted for less than 9 percent of total nonfarm employment. The nu...

  Mixed Progress in the Fight Against Inequality and for Democracy Dean Baker I have a birthday coming up, so it seems a good time to assess progress, or lack thereof, on the various issues that I have worked on over the decades. There is some big progress in at least a couple of areas, but not much to boast about in the others. I’ll start with the success stories. The Benefits of a Tight Labor Market The big one, where I feel we really have made huge progress, is the battle for full employment. It might seem like ancient history, but a quarter century ago the absolute standard wisdom in the economics profession was that we could not get unemployment rates below 6.0 percent without ever accelerating inflation. To argue otherwise was to invite ridicule. The reality repeatedly contradicted the theory. We sustained an unemployment rate of 4.0 percent in 2000, with only a very modest increase in the inflation rate. The recession caused by the collapse of the stock bubble drove the unem...