Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Thatcherite narrative on wealth creation has gone unchallenged for decades

“To Tackle Inequality, We Need to Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From,” Evonomics, Laurie Macfarlane, March 13, 2021 Do people in Britain resent the rich? According to two new studies published this week, the answer to this question is: “not really.” The studies, one commissioned by Trust for London and another by Tax Justice UK, […]

“How The Humanities Building Went Wrong” Or Does Brutalist Architecture Represent Fascist “Institutionalized Tyranny”?

“How The Humanities Building Went Wrong” Or Does Brutalist Architecture Represent Fascist “Institutionalized Tyranny”?  My freshly arrived Spring 2021 issue of “On Wisconsin,” the alumni magazine of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has an article whose title is the first part of the title above in quotation marks.  The later quotation marks phrase appears in the […]

What to do?

https://angrybearblog.com/2020/04/tip-of-the-iceberg#more-56219 The US spent $Billions to help Columbia stem the flow of cocaine. Why not spent a few $Billions to alleviate the poverty and social unrest produced by Climate change in El Salvador? Why not spend a few $Trillion to slow, then reverse Climate Change? — The Biden Administration is faced with a problem of […]

Kids Used To Sell Old Newspapers for Pennies

I was told this by someone years ago. We tried to do this and were not to successful in the fifties. March Madness comment below. Sen. Whitehouse: Dark Money Behind GOP Judges Is Now Behind Voter Suppression | Crooks and Liars, Aliza Worthington, March 13, 2021 “Sen. Whitehouse chairs a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary […]

February consumer inflation begins to heat up a little

February consumer inflation begins to heat up a little Seasonally adjusted consumer prices rose 0.4% in February. As a result, over the past several months there has been a significant uptick in YoY inflation to 1.7% from 1.1% in November.  Aside from the pandemic, for the past 40 years, recessions had happened when CPI less […]

During the wintertime pandemic surge, hiring hit a brick wall

January JOLTS report: during the wintertime pandemic surge, hiring hit a brick wall Yesterday morning’s JOLTS report for January was confirmatory of the weak jobs report for that month, showing a largely paused recovery. Further, for the second month in a row, hires were down sharply. Let’s examine this in accord with the data from […]

Ethic of leisure

William Godwin’s ethic of leisure and the riddle of social justice In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) William Godwin declared, “the object, in the present state of society, is to multiply labour; in another state, it will be to simplify it.” In The Enquirer (1797), he affirmed, “[t]he genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with […]

Financial Globalization and Inequality

by Joseph Joyce Financial Globalization and Inequality The global financial crisis slowed the pace of financial globalization, while the impact of the pandemic on its future course is unclear. But enough time has elapsed to assess the record of integrated financial markets that greatly expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s. The evidence on one […]