I’m stunned by how good the new Jacobin piece by Seth Ackerman is: “Piketty’s Fair-Weather Friends.” It gives what I find to be the best understanding so far of the whole Piketty “think space.” It’s so good that I can’t encapsulate it, so I’ll just share some of the passages I’m most taken with, with my […]

[Michigan Republican Senate candidate Terri Lynn] Land, a Byron Center Republican, had defended presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s anti-bailout position two years ago and noted that GM had become known as “Government Motors.” She declined to revisit the topic Wednesday during a brief exchange with reporters, which she cut short following the forum. “I’ve always supported […]

It has been the political right’s mantra of welfare and charity being best done by private organizations rather than be government sponsored. 50 years have passed since President Johnson declared war on poverty. It was declared an abject failure by the right as it did not make people independent nor did it make people want […]

by Joseph Joyce   Protesting Madame Lagarde The protests at Smith College that led to the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, as this year’s commencement speaker have been widely denounced as a manifestation of intolerance. They also demonstrate a lack of understanding of the IMF and the many changes […]

by Barclay Rosser (reposted from Econospeak with permission from the author) Fred Hiatt Thinks Obama Not War whooping Enough In today’s Washington Post, editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, has a column under his own name entitled, “A critique of Obama catches on.”  The critique amounts to Obama being “too passive” in foreign policy, with this […]

Greg Sargent gets a great nugget from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who “recently conducted a statewide poll in Kentucky for an unnamed client and found that Kynect polls very positively, in contrast to Obamacare, which is underwater.” Kynect is the Kentucky version of the Affordable Care Act exchange. To the extent the polling is correct, […]

This particular post was first picked up at Economist’s View and fits with Sandwichman’s posts on Labor. I have been watching Participation Rate in conjunction with U3 since 2001 along with others such as Laurent Guerby and while the US has decreased in the numbers of people in the Civilian Labor Force, our counterparts in […]

Readers of my AB posts know that a recurring theme of mine is the right’s cooptation of the word “freedom” to disembody the word from actual physical freedom–e.g., from imprisonment–or from personal choice, and to instead define it as a Reagan-era Conservative Legal Movement checklist.  And that these folks achieve this by declaring it mandated by the Constitution’s […]

That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.) We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns: …the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few […]