Subjects Archives: Political Economy

First there was the Great Gatsby curve. Then there was the Proust index. Now, thanks to Neil Irwin, we have the Marx ratio.

These are supposed to be the good times—with our current economic expansion poised to set a record as the longest in U.S. history.

Organizers of the far-right AfD hoped to get 10,000 adherents for a march on Sunday in Berlin, but their ranks were far thinner, even with buddies from openly pro-fascist gangs. After distributing a thousand or more big German flags, they joined ranks and set off on their anti-foreigner, anti-Islam, anti-leftist Berlin crusade.

In our inaugural episode, we consider the recent resurgence of full employment politics in the United States from both a political and historical perspective with historian David Stein (@davidpstein).

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.

Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanations of what happens in (and alongside) markets.

In December 2017 the Congress approved and the President signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

There is no time for long introductions. The world is, possibly heading for yet another catastrophe. This one, if we, human beings will not manage to prevent it, could become our final.

A Donald-Bibi drama is being staged; each is playing his part on cue. Only days after Netanyahu’s press conference attack on Iran, Trump tore up the U.S. copy of the Iran nuclear agreement.

On every scale, from the smallest cells to the entire planet, the essential elements of life are constantly used and re-used. Biogeochemical cycles are the basis of the biosphere.

It’s not just that Marx’s ideas remain relevant — we’re also in the midst of a great new age of Marxian thought.

Capitalism is an economic system driven by its own immanent tendencies, which the State that presides over it normally supports, sustains and accelerates.

In this in-depth interview conducted in Dakar, Samir Amin speaks on a wide range of topics: globalisation; generalised monopoly capital; the alarming growth of inequality; the role of the state in the neoliberal era; globalisation and delinking; capitalism and modernity; the return of fascism in the contemporary capitalist world, and more.

In a 2014 study, Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael Norton asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the United States, how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers.

Goldman Sachs has outdone itself this time. According to Goldman Sachs, curing people of terrible diseases is not good for Wall Street.

Dennis Broe traces the history of the representation of labour on screen, and finds inspiration for celebrating May Day and continuing Marx’s struggle against capitalism.

Let the state provide incomes and social protection, freeing up capital to exploit labour at will says working draft of new flagship report.

Syria enters its eighth year of a bloody and unforgiving war. The death toll is catastrophic. After the number reached 200,000, the United Nations stopped keeping count.

Optimistic assessments of the synchronised recovery across the world economy ignore the factors driving the weak upturn that make it fragile.

The history of capitalism is actually a combination of two histories: it’s a history of employers attempting to hire workers and develop new technologies to make profits and expand the reach of capitalism; it’s also a history of workers banding together to improve wages and working conditions and imagine ways of moving beyond capitalism.