"Pay For" Questions Don't Make Sense on Fed Policy. Do Any?

The Fed announced further measures today designed to stave off the continued plummeting of prices in financial markets. Overall, the Fed has announced over $1.5 trillion in market operations so far. In response, numerous commentators who support robust free public services questioned the apparent hypocrisy of the lack of scrutiny over how such spending is to be financed when it comes to the financial sector. The question doesn't make a whole lot of sense, however, when you consider the difference between when the Fed spends money and when the federal government does it.

There's No Evidence of a Robot Takeover–This Is a Bad Thing

Noah Smith wrote a pretty compelling op ed in Bloomberg on Tuesday demonstrating that worries about a robot apocalypse–the eclipse of human labor by machine labor–are unfounded. He points to the rather steady employment-to-population ratio, the positive correlation between IT investment and jobs, and low productivity growth as proof that robots do not, in fact, cost at least the macroeconomy jobs. (We can't necessarily make assertions microeconomically.)

This is a bad thing.

Who Will Disrupt the Disruptors? A Review of Live Work Work Work Die

The final words of Corey Pein's Live Work Work Work Die are, "Off with their heads." In an engaging, hilarious, and gutwrenching first person account of the netherworld of Silicon Valley startup culture, Pein implores the reader to consider seriously the titans of tech are leading us into. By his account, it is a highly stratified society in which the toiling masses take turns pretending that they are among the tech elite.

UBI vs. JG: Communist Revolution Editiion

I like to talk a lot of shit. I've been talking a lot of shit lately on the Job Guarantee (JG) proposals relative to Universal Basic Income (UBI) in tweets and comments here and there. Since I generally grow bored of conversations on the internet fairly quickly, relatively few people have actually heard anything resembling my full argument in favor of UBI over a JG. So here I am, finding new ways to procrastinate my dissertation work.

The discussion here, I hope, will equip supporters of UBI and the JG with a more holistic understanding of both from the perspective of long-term revolutionary goals. As an anarcho-communist, I view both proposals (technically three proposals, more on that later) through the lens of which can best situate the working class to seize the means of production to establish a decentralized communist production and distribution network.

#tbt Matias Vernengo 2006 Technology, Finance, and Dependency: Latin American Radical Political Economy in Retrospect

Through my odd traverse through economics education, I admittedly haven't gotten into Dependency Theory. This past weekend, I decided to finally look into it. In general, I'm rather impressed. As an anarchist, I generally appreciate any theory which takes as its foundation relationships of power in thinking through social and political relations.

This paper by Matias Vernengo provides a great introduction to dependency theory. Vernengo, who maintains the blog Naked Keynesianism, outlines the development of Dependency Theory through the scholarship of primarily Latin American and US American neo-Marxist and structuralist thought.

Download the paper here

Neoclassical Production Function Reader

Two-Factor Production Function

Charles Cobb & Paul Douglas - A Theory of Production

Robert Solow - Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function

Anwar Shaikh - Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: Humbug II

CES Function

Kenneth Arrow, et al. - Capital Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency

Jesus Felipe & John McCombie - The CES Production Function, the accounting identity, and Occam's razor

Endogenous Technical Change

Paul Romer - Endogenous Technological Change

Francesco Caselli - Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences

Michael Isaacson - Braaaaaaaains! The Undead Humbug Production Function: Now With Human Capital

Shallow Green Resistance

I never really got into the radical environmental movement. I'm sympathetic, but by the time I became any sort of radical leftist, the green scare was in full swing. As national law enforcement cracked down and with virtually all militant environmental activism labeled an act of terrorism, much of the core of the radical environmental movement either went to jail, went soft, or steered clear of the brand of heroics that had become a right of passage.

As corporations continued their push against any and all environmental conservation, advocacy for the environment was left to increasingly out-funded non-profits.

Additionally, a conspiratorial, post-9/11, post-crash political climate filled the environmental movement with entirely too many new age weirdos. This shift brought with it a distinct taming of the movement into a syncretic hodge-podge of lifestyle environmentalists.

#tbt Ben Fine and Anwar Shaikh at the 2015 NSER Journal Launch

"Heterodox Economists Don't Do Math" Reader

Anwar Shaikh - All the Humbug Papers. Literally all of them.

Herbert Simon - A Formal Theory of the Employment Relation

Thomas Herndon et al. - Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff

Duncan Foley and Deepankar Basu - Dynamics of Output and Employment in the U.S. Economy

Jesus de Felipe and John McCombie - The CES Production Function, the Accounting Identity, and Occam's Razor

Cambridge Capital Critique Reader

Joan Robinson - The Production Function and the Theory of Capital

Joan Robinson - Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory

Luigi Pasinetti - Switches of Technique and the "Rate of Return" in Capital Theory

Pierangelo Garegnani - Heterogeneous Capital, the Production Function and the Theory of Distribution

Anwar Shaikh - Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function

A.J. Cohen and Geoff Harcourt - What Ever Happened to the Capital Theory Controversies?

Gary Mongiovi - The Cambridge Tradition in Economics: An Interview with G. C. Harcourt

#tbt Luigi Pasinetti 1966 Changes in the Rate of Profit and Switches of Technique

So the Cambridge capital controversy is currently my favorite thing in straight economic theory. One of my favorites is this one by LL Cool J L. L. Pasinetti. In it, he tests the theoretical underpinnings of the Solow growth model.

Pasinetti builds a two-sector economic model with two available technologies: one with relative capital intensity in one sector, one in the other. He shows that the demand for capital is not monotonically downward-sloping across industries, as maintained by neoclassical theory. Either each industry responds to unique rates of interest which are uncorrelated with any sort of leading market rate (e.g., interbank lending rate), or some industries genuinely do exhibit Giffen-like behavior with respect to capital. In either case, this approach demolishes the notion that you can aggregate or disaggregate factor demand in any meaningful way. Any generalizations derived from macroeconomic data says nothing about underlying microeconomic phenomena.

Unfortunately, the capital critique has been ignored into oblivion in most corners of the economics profession, but I know I'm not the only one trying to bring it back.

Download the article here