socialist-economics

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: The New York Times < nytdirect@nytimes.com > Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2022, 7:43 AM Subject: The Morning: The opioid crisis To: < jcase4218@gmail.com > U.S. overdose deaths keep hitting records year after year. View in browser | nytimes.com February 13, 2022 By German Lopez Good morning. Overdoses are increasing at a troubling rate. A service in Pittsburgh for people who died of drug overdoses. Nate Guidry/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP A rising death toll Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year — more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined. Sean Blake was among those who died. He overdosed at age 27 in Vermont, from a mix of alcohol and fentanyl , a synthetic opioid. He had struggled to find effective treatment for his addiction and other potential mental health problems, repeatedly relapsing. "I do love being sober," Blake wrote in 2014, three years before his death. "It...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/opinion/folk-economics-monetary-policy.html Wonking Out: Very Serious Folk Economics Text Only A few days ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom published an insightful article in The Times about the power of "folk economics" — which she defined as "the very human impulse to describe complex economic processes in lay terms." Her subject was the widespread enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, but her article sent me down memory lane, recalling the role folk economics has played in past policy debates. Just to be clear, the "folk" who hold plausible-sounding but wrongheaded views of the economy needn't be members of the working class. They can be, and often are, members of the elite: plutocrats, powerful politicians and influential pundits. In fact, elite embrace of folk economics was a large part of what went wrong in the global response to the 2008 financial crisis. And it's starting to have a destructive effect now. So, memories...