By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself. Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to […]
This National Bureau of Economic research paper is behind a paywall, but the premise is up for discussion: This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth […]
By Steve Roth (from 2016 October 2) Democracy. Capitalism. Socialism. Choose Any Three of the Above If you don’t have a big bathtub of oil in the ground, you need all three to deliver widespread economic well-being. In the millennias-long evolution of human societies and economic systems, we find ourselves today at a pass where three systems predominate, and fitfully […]
Rep. Tom Garrett is a Republican representing Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. He is a member of the Committees on Education and the Workforce, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs. He presents a problem: We can’t afford to lose the energy, ideas, and vision of young people who give up their dreams of going to college because […]
I should title this: Yeah, it is just like 1929 you freak’n see, hear, and speak no inequality monkeys. I have this pile of income data sorted out from Saez’s work (the GDP is BEA). My thoughts regarding our economy is that income inequality (or equality) matters. It matters so much, that it is the all […]
Jennifer Berkshire pointed Peter Greene to: The election of Donald J. Trump as president offers the best opportunity in decades to shrink the size and power of government and increase individual liberty. So writes the Heartland Institute, a libertarian thinky tank, on a page devoted to all the Trumpian actions they approve of. This outfit was founded in […]
(Dan B. here…I think it is still appropriate as it is a lesson yet to be learned.) by Divorced one like Bush (2009) I think it’s time to reread the World Bank report on what creates wealth because it seems that the arguments against the stimulus are from a mind-set of very narrow thinking […]
By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) You Don’t Own That! The Evolution of Ownership Get off my lawn. (repost) In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling that promise. There are a […]
By Steve Roth (2015) Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” […]
Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually […]