My old friend and mentor, Mason Gaffney, died last week at his home in Redlands, California. I thank David Cay Johnston for a warm and insightful obituary in the New York Times. I also thank Wyn Achenbaum and Nic Tideman and the Schalkenbach Foundation for an extraordinary tribute with excerpts from his writing. Especially check . . . → Read More: Mason Gaffney, October 18, 1923-July 16, 2020
|
|||||
|
In A Brief History of Doom, Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises, Richard Vague simultaneously fills in a gap in Henry George’s economic model, and torpedoes the conventional Keynesian model of the business cycle. . . . → Read More: Webinar with Richard Vague, author of A Brief History of Doom, May 17, 2020  One comment - (Comments are closed)  Webinar  Bubble, Financial crisis, Henry George, Macroeconomics, Real estate bubble Post WW II single family subdivisions have proved a fiscal disaster. At first, they generated substantial tax revenues, making cities eager to encourage and subsidize more of them by extending utilities. But because all the utilities and houses in a subdivision were built at the same time, they all aged at the same rate. After 25 years or so of fiscal surplus, costs began to rise steeply for repairing infrastructure. When city maintenance lagged, those residents who could afford it moved to newer subdivisions further out, leaving shabby houses on crumbling streets inhabited by ever poorer and often minority residents. This happened first in Detroit, where huge areas now lie abandoned. It is now happening in inner suburbs around the nation. Yet as inner suburbs crumble, towns pursue the same old financial fix: subsidizing brand-new subdivisions on raw land. . . . → Read More: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, by Charles Marohn Jr. In The Poverty Industry, Daniel L. Hatcher explains how the austerity following the 2008 financial crisis has induced state and local public service agencies to scam both the federal government and their intended beneficiaries. . . . → Read More: The Poverty Industry: How state and local service agencies scam both the federal government and their intended beneficiaries In the mini-economy of Beanland, reckless bank lending has caused a crash. Hardly anybody has money to buy beans. The price of beans plummets. To the farmers it looks like there’s a bean surplus. Actually, there’s a deficit in demand for beans. . . . → Read More: The Big Bean Bubble A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises is the most important economics publication to come along in years. The author, Richard Vague, a retired banker, documents how a necessary and sufficient explanation for a boom and bust cycle is an episode over several years of excessive private sector lending, typically triggered by an exciting innovation. . . . → Read More: Review: A Brief History of Doom by Richard Vague Four years ago, in The Mouse That Wouldn’t Die, I described how my husband’s colleague Zheng Cui found some mice in his lab that were naturally immune to cancer. Astonishingly, transferring special white blood cells, granulocytes, from immune mice killed cancer in non-immune mice. It turned out that some humans are also super-immune to cancer. . . . → Read More: Garlic, Cancer, and the Public Funding of Scientific Research At a 1972 economics conference, at the height of the Vietnam war, Mason Gaffney presented an invited paper blandly entitled “The Benefits of Military Spending.” The paper so shocked the conference organizer that he refused to include it in the conference volume. Gaffney couldn’t find another publisher willing to touch it. Now, only 46 years later, here’s that paper (draft version), updated by Cliff Cobb, and published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (March 2018). What so offended the economics establishment? . . . → Read More: How the U.S. Military Protects and Enriches Multinational Speculators Comments are closed Book Review, Gaffney Link City economics, Development economics, Inequality, Mason Gaffney, Military spending At a coffee break between sessions at a history of economics meeting, I chatted with a young woman professor of political science at a German university. On hearing that I work on inequality, she immediately challenged me: “I don’t believe in equality. Inequality is just a statistic… What matters are policies to improve citizen’s wellbeing, like health or education, not policies to reduce inequality.” . . . → Read More: From Germany to America: A Dialog on Inequality A colony is an area of land belonging mostly to outsiders, who extract more than they put in, hold good property underused, and control local politics. Greece, Haiti and Puerto Rico are colonies. Given the political will, and absent military intervention, colonies can liberate themselves by taxing the land. . . . → Read More: How Colonies Can Liberate Themselves by Taxing Real Estate |
|||||