I was fiddling around online recently and came across the trope that there's some kind of housing shortage in the US. Jeeze Louise! I thought we'd solved that forever ago. This guy 'splained it in '92:
The model of 'flexible' labour markets with few(er) protections for workers & curtailed unions was (mainstream economists predicted) going to delver innovation, spur entrepreneurship & lead to better-paid jobs... but we actually have got from it is an economy patterned by low-wage labour, inequality, falling real wages & labour exploitation (via precarious working).
As Larry Elliot suggests, its time to follow unions urging to try a different way!
"The literature on degrowth routinely argues (appropriately so) that the global north rather than the global south must be the target for change, but it may well be that the vanguard for degrowth resides, paradoxically, in the global south. It may be that subconscious bias causes us to believe that the global south must catch up with the economic production of the wealthiest states, rather than encouraging us to imagine that the wealthy states need to catch up to the level of consciousness displayed by the most radical societies in the global south."
Self-interest + shortermism + monopoly power = whatever this shit is:
"Frontier knew that it could make a billion dollars in profit over a decade by investing in fiber build-out, but it chose not to, because stock analysts will downrank any carrier that made capital investments that took more than five years to mature. Because Frontier's execs were paid primarily in stock, they chose... to leave a billion dollars sitting on the table..."
So I'm probably going to be nerd sniped into developing a Jupyter notebook to examine the question of how well are mid income families 2 adults and 2 kids doing relative to how well their parents were doing 30 years earlier. I'm going to use a dirichlet prior over the weights on a 5 item CPI based expense index. The missing part is paired nominal earnings of people and their parents... Anyone know a dataset #statistics#data#economics@economics@a.gup.pe
"In American mythology, people are rich because of 'hard work.' Yet nobody can explain why those who do all the actual labor have no money." - Steven Salaita
(Some) ignorant leftbros: "Class first! No idpol!"
Scholars of right wing politics/economics: "All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests."
Above remark from "The Extravagances of Neoliberalism", an interview of Melinda Cooper (author of "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance") by Benjamin Kunkel, in The Baffler.
Markets - Where did all the stocks go?
Public Companies In Decline
The number of public companies has fallen fast by Matt Phillips, David Crowther 4/28/24
"...After analyzing the effects of mergers, private-equity investment, and regulatory costs, the paper suggests that M&A is the main culprit. (Though they do theorize that higher costs associated with regulation could be a less important contributing factor.)
“Mergers seem to be the biggest driver of this trend,” Ali Sanati told Sherwood. Sanati is a finance professor at the American University in Washington, DC, and a coauthor of the 2023 paper.
The authors categorized mergers according to various financial metrics, noting that mergers motivated around financing and innovation “are the ones that effectively reduce the number of U.S. listings.”
Finance and Economic Breakdown: Modeling Minsky's "Financial Instability Hypothesis"
Minus the math, which can be skipped over, for his discussion, the paper lays out the basics of modern economics wrt to economic cycles and labor v capitalist v creditor (banks) income.
It’s the basic model to reason about our economy and its state.
Apple workers are striking at a store in Maryland by Millie Giles 5/13/24
"...In the aftermath of its outrage-inducing object-crushing advert, Apple has been dealt another PR blow, as it faces its first retail employee strike in history.
...While Apple is currently in the firing line for its employee practices, with labor unions like the Communications Workers of America accusing the tech giant of union-busting, collective strike action has been gaining traction across the US more widely..."
By Mary Wildfire, originally published by Resilience.org May 14, 2024
"...A sociopath is by definition selfish, concerned only about getting what he or she wants and unconcerned about anyone else’s needs. And what is it that they want? Usually wealth. Some—the narcissists—also want the spotlight, want fame and adulation. Some crave power for its own sake, aside from the need to use power to get more wealth. Some don’t care about either of those. But mostly, it seems, what the billionaires want is more money. They have more money than they could spend in twenty lifetimes but they still are willing to sacrifice our children’s future to get even more money. This is remarkably narrow thinking, a fascination with numbers—you might even call it machinelike..."
“ One look at this chart should be sufficient to understand why the Great Crash of 1929 was both great, and a major cause of the Great Depression which followed it, and why levered speculation, rather than rational calculation, dominates the behaviour of asset markets.”
“ Treating the rates of change of and HQ as negligible, this implies that the rate of change of house prices is related to—and largely driven by—the acceleration of mortgage debt:”
Interesting, the acceleration in debt itself. Consider the Fed’s policy on interest rates.
Here is a direct relation of interest rates causing inflation.
I’m kind of curious what the system response (of housing prices) to a deceleration of interest rates. If price changes reflect acceleration of home loan interest rates, how does a deceleration propagate into the economy? The US economy is built upon the housing sector. It plays an outsized role in economic health.
The #Australia government is not a household or a business, they are the monopoly issuer of our #currency.
Any #surplus they achieve is necessarily money they could have spent on things we need, but chose not to. That's bad.
Do we want a government that taxes more money than they spend?
I don't. I want a government that identifies what needs doing, and spends whatever money required to achieve that.
And taxes based on which parties or activities should not have as much money as they extracted from the economy. Not a fiction of taxation "to spend on" something else.
The federal government should not have a "balanced #budget", they don't have any need to "find the money" anywhere, they issue as much #AustralianDollar as they choose to at any time.
That's what a federal spending bill does: The money now exists. It didn't "come from" anywhere. Stop waiting for taxation!
With my sisters and brothers from the Science Fiction Economics Lab, we prototyped a method to develop economically consistent science fictional "imperfect utopias" that are within reach (maybe). The secret sauce is a group with good balance of economists, science fiction authors, and "doers" (activists, policy makers).
#GlennLoury's new memoir will be published tomorrow! I've been waiting years, listening to him recount anecdotes as he's worked on the book. Quite the life he's led, going from the South Side of Chicago to youngest member of the Harvard Economics Department, offered a position in the Reagan Administration and author of a book opposing mass incarceration...
Ready for news that will shock nobody? It turns out globalization mostly helps out the richest 10% and has little to no impact on the poorest.
"The influence of globalization on income inequalities worldwide was greater than we had expected. We were particularly surprised that these differences were mainly due to the gains of the richest and that the lower income groups benefited little or not at all."
We really need to rethink our capitalistic obsession of running things like a business. Cutting costs to increase profits obviously doesn't make sense in areas of education, healthcare, public utilities, and prisons, to name just a few.
Hell, Boeing is making a strong case that it doesn't even make sense for businesses to be run like a business, much less these public goods...
Parallels Between Archaic Entrepots and Modern Offshore Banking Centers
By Michael Hudson, originally published by Resilience.org May 10, 2024
"...To create such enclaves has been an objective of mercantile capital through the ages. It patronizes the world’s politically weakest areas as long as they do not do what real governments do: regulate their economies. The search for “neutral territory” expressed itself already in the chalcolithic epoch, many millennia before private enterprise developed as we know it. The result of this impetus is that neolithic towns...and the biblical cities of refuge share the following important common denominator with today’s offshore banking centers: Instead of being centers of local governing, legal, and military power, they were politically neutral sites established outside the jurisdictions of local governments..."
How do we live together in #nature? Wood meadows, a managed & productive #ecosystem, can achieve this balance, a model of human activity benefitting #biodiversity.
For research, I’m going to the 14th European Conference on #Ecological Restoration this August in #Estonia, where the wood meadows are the most biodiverse sites in the world.