socialist-economics

TEXT ONLY Industrial Policy Is a Nostalgic Pipe Dream Jun 25, 2024 JAMES K. GALBRAITH To address the public’s anger after four decades of neoliberalism, progressive and center-left economists are calling for innovation to create wealth “for the many” and to deal with climate change, while also reducing market concentration and power. Unfortunately, they are mistaken about where the real problem lies. SIRACUSA, ITALY – At a recent “ summit ” in Berlin, prominent center-left economists announced a “new consensus” on industrial policy. Their joint declaration was then published in full by the Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze , who described it as “remarkable both for its capacious agreement on economic and industrial policy principles and the way they are embedded in a reading of the political and geopolitical risks of the moment.” According to the Berlin declaration, those risks are of two types. There are “real risks” such as climate change, “unbearable inequalities,”...

  via Project Syndicate . TEXT ONLY From the Washington Consensus to the Berlin Declaration Jun 27, 2024 DANI RODRIK , LAURA TYSON , and THOMAS FRICKE Dozens of leading economists and practitioners convened in Berlin at the end of May for a summit organized by the Forum for a New Economy. Remarkably, the summit led to something resembling a new understanding that may replace the decades-long reign of neoliberal orthodoxy. CAMBRIDGE/BERKELEY/BERLIN – Paradigm shifts in mainstream economic thinking usually accompany crises demanding new answers, as occurred after stagflation – low growth and high inflation – gripped advanced economies in the 1970s. And it may be happening again, as liberal democracies confronted a wave of popular distrust in their ability to serve their citizens and address the multiple crises – ranging from climate change to unbearable inequalities and major global conflicts – that threaten our future. The consequences can now be seen in the United States, where for...

AI IS ALREADY WREAKING HAVOC ON GLOBAL POWER SYSTEMS The Big Take June 21, 2024 Like much of Northern Virginia, Loudoun County was once known for its horse farms and Civil War battle sites. But over the past 15 years, many of this community’s fields and forests have been cleared away to build the data centers that form the backbone of our digital lives. The rise of artificial intelligence is now turbocharging demand for bigger data centers, transforming the landscape even more and taxing the region’s energy grids. On a crisp afternoon this spring, the newest facility was nearing completion. When it’s done, this 200,000-square-foot building could use as much energy as 30,000 homes in the US. But first, it needs to get enough power... The energy supply can’t come soon enough for DataBank, the data center provider that owns the Virginia facility. An unnamed "big tech" client leased the entire facility and was so eager to tap into the complex to access computing resources for AI ...

  LINK Jun 10, 2024  DANI RODRIK and ROHAN SANDHU Today’s developing economies are in a bind, because innovation in manufacturing has taken a predominantly skill-biased form, reducing demand for workers with relatively low levels of education. This means that labor-absorbing services must become productive enough to support income growth. BERLIN – The future of developing countries is in services. This may sound odd in view of the fact that industrialization has been the traditional road to growth and eventual prosperity, one traveled by all of today’s rich economies and by more recent successes such as South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Manufacturing seems even more essential given that industrial policies to revive it are back in fashion in the US and Europe. 2 But today’s manufacturing is different. Innovation in manufacturing has taken a predominantly skill-biased form, reducing demand for workers with relatively low levels of education. New technologies such as automation, ...

HUMBOLDT AND GAZA Berlin Bulletin No. 222    May 4 2024 Victor Grossman, Berlin                               wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de   No books were burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too alarming! It was May 10 th in Germany's terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire. Most authors were German - Jewish, atheist, liberal, leftist, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Sigmund Freud and   Magnus Hirschfeld, but also some foreign works were thrown into the flames – Maxim Gorki, Hemingway, Jack London, Dos Passos. Ninety-one years later, this May 3rd, just...

Dean Baker:   Profits Are Still Rising, Why Is the Fed Worried About Wage Growth? April 3 I was more than a bit surprised to see the profit data this morning. I really did believe that the profit surge during the pandemic was a one-off, associated with supply-chain issues. We can argue about how much of this increase was a predictable story, where profits rise due to shortages, and how much was about companies exploiting market power to jack up prices, but the fact that profit shares increased is not disputable. In any case, it was reasonable to expect that profits would return to their pre-pandemic shares after supply chains returned to normal. That doesn’t look like what is happening, as shown below. Source: BEA and author’s calculations, see text. The profit share of corporate income rose to 26.8 percent in the fourth quarter from 26.3 percent in the third quarter. That is down only 0.5 percentage points from its pandemic peak of 27.3 percent in the second quarter of 2021 a...

  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...