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Though the situation is often described as a problem of inequality, this is not quite the real concern. The issue is runaway incomes at the very top—people earning a million and a half dollars or more according to the most recent data.
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China’s monetary policy and its inflation have got people talking – particularly about the effect on other countries. But what about its effect on China’s people? Are they fooled by money illusion?
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Beccaria was primarily an economist. Joseph Schumpeter referred to him as the “Italian Adam Smith” — but in importance only. His economics, as you will see, were radically different than Smith’s.
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Suspicions that capitalism and democracy may not sit easily together are far from new. From the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the bourgeoisie and the political Right expressed fears that majority rule, inevitably implying the rule of the poor over the rich, would ultimately do away with private property and free markets.
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“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff to President-elect Obama, said in November 2008, describing the opportunities for reform presented by the financial meltdown.
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The room in which the world's food is distributed looks everything but appetizing. Bits of paper and disposable cups litter the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).
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As we approach three years since the fall of Lehman Brothers, the incentives that led the financial sector to take on too much risk still exist.
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Did anti-regulation lobbying fuel the subprime crisis? This column shows that there is a strong relationship between financial industry lobbying and favourable financial regulation legislation. It argues that the financial industry fought, and defeated, measures that might have curbed some of the reckless lending practices that many think played a pivotal role in igniting the crisis.
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Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting.
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This spring, curiosity propelled me onto a New York City subway bound for Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, where a new bike path along the edge of Brooklyn’s largest park had angry residents worked up into a lather.
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It is often said that the public debt is a burden we leave to our children and grandchildren. Even Barack Obama said the same when he was a Senator.
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Nearly four years after the onset of the worst financial crisis since 1929, a remarkable unanimity as to ‘what is to be done’ appears to prevail among mainstream Anglophone economists.
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The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order.
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Keynes’ General Theory is 75 years old. In this column, Paul Krugman argues that many of its insights and lessons are still relevant today, but many have been forgotten.
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The main consequences of the internationalization of monopoly capital for accumulation are the intensification of world exploitation and a deepening tendency to stagnation.
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In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes ridiculed economists for having a high opinion of themselves and their work.
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What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading
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Lampedusa is a beautiful island closer to North Africa than to Sicily. In the last two months it has been flooded with migrants, mostly coming from Tunisia.
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America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare
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There comes a point when the financial sector has a negative effect on growth – that is, when credit to the private sector exceeds 110% of GDP.
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Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe
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It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year.
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Apart from the patently nonreality-based dissent of its Republican members, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission could hardly have expected the report it issued in January to arouse much excitement.
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The hexagonal world of Die Siedler von Catan, with its little wooden cities and its alluring rock quarries and wheat fields, first appeared on my radar in 2006, when I was a senior in college.
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by John O’Malley
Most people have heard of the Council of Trent, and probably most of what they have heard is negative. It was a church council convoked to condemn the Reformation. It initiated a repressive epoch in Catholic countries and opposed everything good in the burgeoning “modern world.” It launched the dreaded Counter-Reformation. Beyond such clichés, few can venture. Like most clichés, these are badly misleading.
by Talia Schaffer
Gay marriage supposedly interferes with “traditional marriage,” say its opponents. “We have at least 6,000 years of recorded history on our side,” remarked Kris Mineau, president of the conservative group Massachusetts Family Institute. People like Mineau assume that the traditional definition of the family is stable, unvarying and ancient.
by Sebastian Normandin
So this is the thing. I’ve been breathing a long time but, driven by the objective of writing a book, only recently started deliberately thinking about it. We commonly view breathing as a pedestrian automatism, but I try to imagine how this simple physiological function was once perceived as miraculous. Always that fine but-oh-so-definitive line between breathing and not. 
by Alexander McGregor
In the construction of a genuinely socialist state, shaped upon Bolivarian principles, arguably little has been achieved in the last fifty years and the regime, apparently, withstands the inevitable decay of popular support through both repression and an almost mystical, religious prosecution of the ‘eternal possibility’: keep fighting, oh sons of Cuba, one day we shall be finally rid of our enemies and then we may be truly free.
by Dylan J. Montanari
For anyone who has ever heard Fried lecture, it is easy enough to hear his voice as one reads his writing. He is unafraid of the “I,” using it so earnestly that his work seems to take on the mode of confession at times, especially when he is at his most enthusiastic or urgent. 
by Jenny Diski
I am awkward around art. Not at all confident about how I should look and what I should feel. I stand both pleased and helpless in front of this painting and look, think about what I’m looking at, and wonder about it, in as much as I can, because I’m not an art historian. Often, standing in front of paintings I wonder what it is I am supposed to be feeling beyond the looking and thinking. 
by Masha Tupitsyn
In America, we aim to raise children who can do things — anything — not children who can’t. Ruthless competition and competence is at the heart of the American dream. However, when it comes to contemporary America, and contemporary American masculinity in particular, what exactly does it mean to be capable of “anything” now?
by Daniel Tutt
Alain Badiou’s translation of Plato leaves us with the rare sense that politics can once again be associated with truth, courage and justice. We have an agency at our disposal that comes in the passionate work of bringing the idea of equality (communism) into existence. 
by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Oddly enough, many analysts forget that when Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998, his populist discourse did include references neither to anti-neoliberalism nor to radical socialism. Instead, the role model that he had in mind was that of Tony Blair’s Third Way. Chávez wanted to rebuild the economy by finding a new balance between the state and the free market.
by Russell Bennetts
1. John Barrowman.
3. Music I listen to for pleasure being used for pain. (I know this happened IRL, but nonetheless.)
6. Maya’s Lana Del Rey impression in the final scene of the movie. 
by Joanna Walsh
What are dreams for? Elliptical, intimate, (seemingly) significant; from predicting the future to returning the repressed, these least fathomable experiences have always had an interpretive function laid on them. A similar question lies at the heart of the Oulipo. 
by Leo Tolstoy
An elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town, the younger to a peasant in the village. As the sisters sat over their tea talking, the elder began to boast of the advantages of town life: saying how comfortably they lived there, how well they dressed, what fine clothes her children wore, what good things they ate and drank, and how she went to the theatre, promenades, and entertainments.Most Popular
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