Georges Sorel thought he had made a ‘happy choice’ with his use of the term ‘myth.’ But he soon was disabused of that illusion by critics who dismissed the anachronism of myths and others who accused him of falsifying “the real opinions of revolutionaries.” In his essay, “Myths of the Twentieth Century” published three decades […]
by Joseph Joyce The Electoral Consequences of Globalization The reasons for the election of Donald Trump as President of the U.S. will be analyzed and argued about for many years to come. Undoubtedly there are U.S.-specific factors that are relevant, such as racial divisions in voting patterns. But the election took place after the British […]
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, weighed in last week on one of the pressing issues facing the incoming Trump administration and the country — slow economic growth. Greenspan’s explanation is novel and bound to be controversial. To preview: He blames the welfare state and overall uncertainty for the slowdown. … By […]
I left this in draft since Nov 3 and am publishing this now…. by Joseph Joyce The Retreat of Financial Globalization? Eight years after the global crisis of 2008-09, its reverberations are still being felt. These include a slowdown in world trade and a reassessment of the advantages of globalization. Several recent papers deal […]
– by New Deal democrat The long leading indicators: on the cusp of turning negative? A “long leading indicator” is an economic metric that reliably turns a year or more before the onset of a recession. Geoffrey Moore, who for decades published the Index of Leading Indicators, and in 1993 wrote Leading Economic Indicators: New […]
I had an interesting web experience. My tweet noting that the US Treasury made a profit on TARP got a relatively large number of replies. Many people were outraged in many contradictory ways. Twitter is damaging the discussion. Trump on twitter lowered the level of debate. I am now a carrier of Twitteritis into the […]
The race to be the next head of the Democratic National Committee has quickly turned into a proxy fight between liberals and establishment types about where the party needs to go in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday. Liberals are insistent that Clinton’s defeat was the result of […]
by New Deal democrat Understanding American society: a few important bookmarks for a post-election Sunday I wanted to bookmark a few facts that seem very important to understand American society in November 2016. I. Econometric election models accurately forecast a very close election: Figure 1 2. The working class blames Washington over Wall Street for […]
by New Deal democrat About an 2 hours ago, Hillary Clinton pulled ahead of Donald Trump in the popular vote, 59.2 M vs. 59.0 M. If this holds up, it will be the second time in five elections that the democrats have won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. I have been saying […]
Via Bill Black at Naked Capitalism and Thomas Frank at the Guardian. What we need to focus on now is the obvious question: what the hell went wrong? What species of cluelessness guided our Democratic leaders as they went about losing what they told us was the most important election of our lifetimes?