socialist-economics

from Brad DeLong's blog (former depy Sec of Treasury) As of the end of February the stock market is forecasting a very sharp, sudden recession in the probability of a recess... https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/02/as-of-the-end-of-february-the-stock-market-is-forecasting-a-very-sharp-sudden-recession-in-the-probability-of-a-recession-fr.html As of the end of February the stock market is forecasting a very sharp, sudden recession in the probability of a recession from near zero a week ago to better-than-even today: that is the only way to make sense of the S&P 500 over the past week. Thus it is not too late to plan. It is, rather, time to act to offset the likely spending contraction we now see much closer than the horizon. Here are the plans we should have made:  Alyssa Fisher :  Planning for the Next Recession by Reforming U.S. Automatic Stabilizers   https://equitablegrowth.org/planning-for-the-next-recession-by-reforming-u-s-macroeconomic-policy-automatic-stabilizers/ : ...

Lack of paid sick days and large numbers of uninsured increase risks of spreading the coronavirus https://www.epi.org/blog/lack-of-paid-sick-days-and-large-numbers-of-uninsured-increase-risks-of-spreading-the-coronavirus/ COVID-19—commonly known as the coronavirus—is now a potential threat for the United States and we all "need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives,"  warned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  (CDC) this week. Unfortunately, preparing for the "significant disruption" will be economically unimaginable for one group of Americans—the millions of people in the United States who do not have access to paid sick days or have health insurance with a regular health care provider. The CDC released  very clear instructions  to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including staying home when you are sick. Not everyone has that option. Overall, just under three-quarters (73%) of private sector workers in the United State...

PK nails it. Watch out for Trump  "states of emergency" once he abandons "its a democratic hoax" position. When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html text only: So, here's the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It's actually good for America. Also, it's a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it's no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we'll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn't believe in science. From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we've gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test ...

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More from Branko Milanovic on the history and character of wealth. Historical Wealth: How to Compare Croesus and Bezos https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/27/02/2020/historical-wealth-how-compare-croesus-and-bezos Following on from his previous post, Branko Milanovic further explores the difficulty of comparing wealth over the ages and across societies.    A few days ago  I wrote a post on wealth comparisons overtime . I have done such a comparison myself in " The haves and the have-nots " and have used Adam Smith's argument that person's wealth ought to be measured in the amount of labor he commands. In other words, wealth needs to be measured in its historical context. I gave two examples of misleading wealth comparisons: over time, when we try to use the same bundle of commodities to compare Croesus and Bezos, and when we conflate wealth and power.   Here I would like to explain a bit more the problems with historical comparisons of wealth (or income) because ...

A powerful piece on the consequences of the Thuchdides Trap in the context of an epidemic: " Thus, the Thucydides' Trap is about the unavoidable nature of military confrontation between a rising power and a declining hegemon. In this scenario, Beijing is the challenger to American global supremacy and sooner or later Washington, as Sparta did many millennia ago, will find itself in a position where it will have to defend its global standing position by attacking China." Epidemics and the real Thucydides Trap https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/26/02/2020/epidemics-and-real-thucydides-trap Emilian Kavalski and Nicholas Ross Smith, from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, explore the coronavirus outbreak through an international relations lens. To "imagine" is a powerful human exercise, as many successful inventors around the world can attest. It is also a crucial, but perhaps sometimes underutilized, exercise for security analysis and forecasting. So,...

This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a virus. OK, it's not that bad — or at least I don't think it is. The coronavirus isn't the Black Death; so far there's no reason to believe that it will be remotely as deadly as the influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918-19, killing as many as 50 million people. But that said, we've clearly missed whatever chance we had of containing the disease's spread. And it's going to be seriously disruptive. For some reason markets, which had been weirdly complacent for weeks, decided to panic yesterday. I don't know why it took so long, but there are three good reasons to be very worried about the economic impact of what isn't yet officially a pandemic, but is obviously headed for that status. First, we have a deeply interdependent world economy, and China — still the epicenter of the pandemic, although this thing is going global ...

From Tim Taylor, and in the interest of advancing economic literacy, an excellent review of literature on the Indian economy and history. Untangling India's Distinctive Economic Story http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/untangling-indias-distinctive-economic.html It's easy enough to explain why China's economic development has gotten more attention than that of India. China's growth rate has been faster. China's effect on international trade has created more a shock for the rest of the global economy. In geopolitical terms, China looks more like a rival. Also, China's basic story-line of trying to liberalize a centrally-planned economy while keeping a communist government is fairly easy to tell. But whatever the plausible reasons why China's economy has gotten more attention than India, it seems clear to me that India's economic developments have gotten far too little attention. A symposium in the Winter 2020 issue of the Journal of Economic...

The Red Caboose has sent you a link to a blog: Blog: Enlighten Radio Post: End of the Road -- the Feb 20, 2020 Show -- "The Off-white Wedding Dress" Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2020/02/end-of-road-feb-20-2020-show-off-white.html -- Powered by Blogger https://www.blogger.com/

Sherry Linkon and her cooperative do fascinating research into working class culture Precarity Goes to the Movies https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/precarity-goes-to-the-movies/ Two recent events, vastly different in scale and importance, nonetheless point to the importance of the concept of the precariat, a relatively new coinage for the class of exploited, underemployed and temp workers of the world. The Oscars' celebration of the South Korean film  Parasite foregrounded what even mainstream critics in the  New York Times  and the  Washington Post  called a "class war" between the comfortable rich in glossy mansions and the precariat, a miserable underclass who live in Seoul's gross  banjiha  or semi-basements. The other event, the pandemic of the latest coronavirus COVID-19 that, among other horrors, curtailed the yearly—and only–vacation of hundreds of millions of Chinese migratory workers, who would normally travel home to the countryside from ...