socialist-economics

Robert J Gordon is a well known and influential analyst on the perplexing shifts in productivity [our most important value-creating measure for human work] since the onset of the computer age and the vast expansion in the production -- and consumption -- of intangibles. Here he opens a different door:  new studies reveal a correspondence between poverty and productivity, and recommends big interventions in "education" at age 6 months, not just in K-12. Huge vocabulary gaps between upper and poor classes are a telling marker. Of course, maybe the first "intervention" should just be ending poverty. That might lessen the cost of the "intervention" in the long run.. Robert J. Gordon: Thoughts on Long-Run US Productivity Growth https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/02/robert-j-gordon-thoughts-on-long-run-us.html Leo Feler has a half-hour interview with Robert J. Gordon  on "The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of American Growth"  (UCLA Anderson ...

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Chump change: The Romney–Cotton minimum wage proposal leaves 27 million workers without a pay increase https://www.epi.org/blog/romney-cotton-minimum-wage/ Those who had high hopes for a serious minimum wage proposal from the Republican Party will be disappointed: The recent  proposal  released by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would not even increase the minimum wage to 1960s levels, after adjusting for inflation. It is a meager increase that fails to address the problem of low pay in the U.S. economy. The Romney–Cotton proposal would slowly raise the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $10 per hour in 2025. In contrast, the  Raise the Wage Act of 2021  would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. The Romney–Cotton proposal would leave 27.3 million workers without a pay increase, compared to the Raise the Wage Act. Only 4.9 million workers, or 3.2% of the workforce, would receive a pay increase in 2025 under the Romney–Cotton p...

To Prevent the Resurgence of the Pandemic, Can We Talk About Open-Source Research? http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/beat_the_press/~3/LRr-RLzAMF4/ As the vaccination campaign picks up steam, we have many public health experts warning us about a possible resurgence of the pandemic due to the spread of new vaccine resistant strains. The logic is that, as more people are protected against the predominant strain for which the vaccines were designed, it will allow room for mutations to spread, for which the current vaccines may not be effective. This can leave us in a whack-a-mole situation, where we have to constantly alter our vaccines and do new rounds of inoculations to limit the death and suffering from the pandemic. This situation would seem to make the urgency for open-sourcing our research on vaccines even greater than in the past. The point is that we would want evidence on new strains to be shared as quickly as possible. We also would want the evidence on the effectiveness of the cu...

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Economic Policy Institute < newsletter@epi.org > Date: Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 10:22 AM Subject: [WEBINAR] Register now: Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond To: < jcase4218@gmail.com > Join EPI for a discussion on policies for recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and overcoming longstanding racial disparities in the labor market. View this email in your browser ...

Yellen speaks to the NY Times. Commentary? text-only below Janet Yellen on Jobs, Debt, Taxes, Climate and Cryptocurrency https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/business/dealbook/janet-yellen-dealbook.html Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, has given only a handful of interviews since taking up her post about a month ago. Business leaders and investors hang on her every word, trying to divine how she and the Biden administration will steer policy and how this will impact the economy and the markets. Ms. Yellen, previously the chair of the Federal Reserve, is skilled at staying on message, but in an interview with me for the DealBook DC Policy Project, she hinted at some policy priorities in her typically understated way. Here are the highlights of what she said about some of the biggest issues — and my interpretation about what it means. On jobs When I asked Ms. Yellen what metric she would use to measure success in her new role, she made it clear that one issue rose above all others:...

Mission impossible https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/02/20/mission-impossible/ A very good intro and review of Mariana Mazzucato, who has become a global celebrity of sort while remaining a serious intellectual force in government economic policy. Despite his unnecessarily snarky conclusion, I think 'Brother Roberts' has some affection and infatuation with Prof. Mazzucato. Italian-American economist, Mariana Mazzucato, who works and resides in London, has become a big name in what we might call 'centre-left' or even in mainstream economic and political circles.  She has a new book out,  Mission Economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism. Mazzucato was briefly an economic adviser to the UK Labour Party under Corbyn and McDonnell; she apparently  "has the ear"  of radical Congress representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she advised Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Elizabeth Warren and also Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon.  Sh...

The Dependence of US Higher Education on International Students https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-dependence-of-us-higher-education.html US higher education in recent decades had beeome ever-more dependent on rising inflows of international students--a pattern that was already in likely to slow down and now is being dramatically interrupted by the pandemic.  John Bound, Breno Braga, Gaurav Khanna, and Sarah Turner describe these shifts in "The Globalization of Postsecondary Education: The Role of International Students in the US Higher Education System"  ( Journal of Economic Perspective s, Winter 2021, 35:1, 163-84). They write:  For the United States, which has a large number of colleges and universities and a disproportionate share of the most highly ranked colleges and universities in the world, total enrollment of foreign students more than tripled between 1980 and 2017, from 305,000 to over one million students in 2017 (National Center for Enrollment...

The Green New Deal Threatens Republicans' Bread and Butter, it's Not Just Competition in the Battle of Ideas http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/beat_the_press/~3/Q2R6u8P9KHk/ Naomi Klein has an interesting  piece  in the New York Times on the implications of the Texas disaster. I would disagree with some parts, which attack the Texas approach to energy as "free market." To my view, this is far too generous. Even Texas' deregulated energy market is still highly regulated. It is possible to have hugely different outcomes and incentives by structuring the market in slightly different ways. For example, since the supply of electricity to individual homes in inherently a monopoly relationship (no one will have two electrical hookups), the burden can be placed on the provider to ensure electricity in a specified price range, rather than structuring the market so the risk lies entirely with consumers. The latter makes little sense for free market types, since consumers both ...