Economics
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Many economists have expressed concern that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s, as illustrated in the following chart from the Economic Policy Institute. Source: Economic Policy Institute. For workers in the 10th, 20th and 50th percentiles, median hourly wages haven’t grown much at all since the early 1970s. But a few economists have argued that this misses what’s really going on: Since the 1970s, women and racial minorities have become more integrated into the general workforce. So while white men, white women and racial minorities of both genders have all seen gains, the argument goes, the lower wages paid to women and racial minorities push down the median wage figure enough that these gains are disguised.
Wages aren’t stagnating, they’re plummeting
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears.
Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011
£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite | Business | The Observer
The Cayman Islands: a favourite haven from the taxman for the global elite. Photograph: David Doubilet/National Geographic/Getty Images A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network. James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited , released exclusively to the Observer .The Financial Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago
Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this . We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.
We Have Forgotten What the Ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, the Early Jews and Christians, the Founding Fathers and Even Napoleon Bonaparte Knew About Money
Mike “Mish” Shedlock has repeatedly pointed out that we have reached “peak credit” – and there will not in our lifetimes be as much credit as we saw from 2000-2008. I noted last year: Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.
The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union
Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com July 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources.
Capitalism’s Brave New World
There is a certain view of economics that regards Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as both a utopian scheme and a vision of the future. Free-marketers and libertarians will be awed by the spectacle of an untrammeled labor market: A cavalcade of employers make available a wide variety of work. The jobs and compensation are exhaustively defined. A multitude of laborers examine this menu and decide which jobs appeal to them and whether the compensation is adequate. No one is forced to take a job he doesn’t like.
The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War
Page 2 of 3 The great British notion of idea of working hard and succeeding through sheer pluck — an idea also embedded in the U.K.’s former colonies, such as the U.S. — has been largely devalued. Dick Hobbs, a scholar at the London School of Economics, says this demoralization has particularly affected white Londoners. Many immigrants have thrived doing engineering and construction work as well as in trades providing service to the capital’s affluent elites.
MetaEconomics
Thinking outside the 1930s box
7 October 2011 Last updated at 09:38 ET There are two kinds of people at present: those who know in a vague way that the 1930s was a bad time, and those who have studied the detail and understand the economics of why it went bad. The latter are now getting publicly terrified because they can see, very clearly, the danger of doing it all again. They include S ir Mervyn King on Sky last night : "This is the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever." And Barack Obama, whose comment " Europe is scaring the world " hit the nail on the head.
World now has 'more people dying from obesity than malnutrition'
More people in the world are now dying from obesity than malnutrition, anti-poverty campaigners say. There were 1.5billion dangerously overweight people worldwide last year, while 925million were underfed, according to the Red Cross. The figures were denounced as a ‘shocking’ demonstration that the world produces enough food but people still go hungry. The Red Cross called it a ‘double-edged’ scandal that fewer people died of starvation than were being killed by ‘excess nutrition’. The organisation’s Bekele Geleta said: ‘If the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 per cent of humanity are hungry while 20 per cent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere.’
"I was on top of the Westin Hotel being shown the sights of [Shanghai], and I had a sudden crisis as I looked out at the extraordinary skyscrapers the architecture and the art deco. I thought to myself, well, the mandate of heaven has passed from us and come home." - Gore Vidal, 2007 I'll say this about Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation hypothesis: it has really made me think.
Great Stagnation...or Great Relocation?
2008 Crisis
Economics Studies/ Articles
"They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice
"They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice Attention conservation notice : 1000+ words on the limits of welfare economics, in the form of a thought experiment or parable superficially tuned to the holiday (and brooding on my hard-disk for months). Gloomy, snarky, heavy-handed, academic, and obvious to anyone who knows enough about the subject to care. Have you no friends and family to whom you should be showing your love (perhaps in the form of food )? Let us consider a simple economy with three individuals. Alice is a restaurateur; she has fed herself, and has just prepared a delicious turkey dinner, at some cost in materials, fuel, and her time.China
Marxian Economics
US