Top ten posts of 2023: AI, polycrisis, banking and inflation

2023 was the 13^th year since I launched this blog. Over those years, I have posted 1194 times with over 5.23 million viewings and over 2m visitors. There are currently 7572 regular followers of the blog; and now 13670 followers of the  Michael Roberts Facebook site, which I started eight years ago.  On that Facebook site, I put short daily items of information or comment on economics and economic events.   Please follow.

And at the beginning of 2020, I also launched the Michael Roberts You Tube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYM7I0m-I9EVB-5gaBqiqbg/. This now has 2960 subscribers.  If you haven’t joined up yet, have a look at the channel, which includes presentations by me on a variety of economic subjects; interviews with other Marxist economists; and some zoom debates in which I participated. 

My top three videos of 2023 were: Henryk Grossman with Rick Kuhn; Capitalism in the 21^st century on our new book with Mino Carchedi; and what would Marx and Engels say about the 21^st century capitalism.  I hope to do some new videos very soon.

This year I also launched a Twitter site. https://twitter.com/BlogRoberts  That has not taken off with only 129 followers.  That’s partly because the blog and my Facebook site cover the same things and Twitter requires much more work on a daily basis.  I’ll try and boost it this coming year, although it seems in general that Twitter is beginning to flag in social media.  Watch that Twitter space.

As for the blog, 2023 saw 488,000 views, down from last year and the record COVID year when everybody was stuck at home online. But I did 83 posts this year, up from 77 last year and those that read them stayed on the site for more views with an average 2.76 views per visitor – a record. 

Where do my blog viewers come from?  From over 199 countries globally! Led by 114k yearly viewings in the US (or about 24%); 60k from UK (14%); then all the G20 and BRICs countries. Brazil and Spain are the next largest viewers followed by Canada, Argentina, Germany and Australia.  Right at the other end of the spectrum, I have had viewings from Vanuatu, Greenland, Yemen, Mali, Timor, New Caledonia and Gabon. 

So what was the top post of this year?  It was my post on AI-GPT.  The rise of generative AI was the big technology event of the year and so, not surprisingly, it attracted the interest of blog followers.  In that post, I discussed the strength and faults in the new Language Learning Models LLMs) with some examples; the likely impact of LLMs of jobs in many occupations and whether new technology leads to a net loss or rise in jobs; and whether AI really will surpass and replace human intelligence.

A second post on ChatGPT and whether knowledge can have value in Marxist terms also got into the top ten.  In this post, my close colleague in Marxist economics, Guglielmo Carchedi, discussed the production of knowledge and how it could be commodified under capitalism.  This provoked a lot of debate in comments when he said: “to believe that computers are capable of human thinking is not only wrong; it is also a pro-capital ideology because that is being blind to the class content of the knowledge stored up in labour power and thus to the contradictions inherent in the generation of knowledge.”

What happens with AI is something for the future, but the next most popular post was for here and now.  It was analysis of the current contradictions in 21^st capitalism caused by the Long Depression in the world economy in the last decade and the coming together of a bunch of crises: climate change; rising inequality; the after-effects of the COVID pandemic on human development globally; the rising geopolitical conflicts; and the significant decline in confidence about the future of humanity.

The other big issue that absorbed blog readers was the policy of central banks to control inflation through hiking interest rates to post-2009 highs this year.  In one post I argued that central bank interest rate hikes were not going to bring inflation down because the rise in inflation was not due to ‘excessive demand’ or ‘excessive wage increases’ but to supply blockages, poor recovery in manufacturing and falling international trade after the end of the pandemic. 

By the end of this year, the evidence was overwhelming that inflation was a supply-side matter (including rising profit margins) and, in that sense, ‘transitory’ – although it remains to be seen if inflation rates ever get back to pre-pandemic levels.

What rising interest rates did lead to were bank failures like SVB, the reasons for which I described in another popular post. 

Indeed, there were a surge of failures in small US regional banks last March and the collapse of the huge Credit Suisse bank in Europe.  That led to bailouts and central bank credit injections to stabilize the financial sector. 

In another post, I again pointed out the uselessness of so-called regulation of the financial sector to stop such crashes. As David Kane at the New Institute for Economic Thinking put it, as “the instruments assigned to this task are too weak to work for long. With the connivance of regulators, US megabanks are already re-establishing their ability to use dividends and stock buybacks to rebuild their leverage back to dangerous levels.” Kane notes that “top regulators seem to believe that an important part of their job is to convince taxpayers that the next crash can be contained within the financial sector and won’t be allowed to hurt ordinary citizens in the ways that previous crises have.”  But “these rosy claims are bullsh*t.”

In another post I argued that the banking crisis last March could return because interest rates are set to stay high for some time and companies are stocking up sizeable debt servicing costs while profit growth is slowing.

‘Zombie’ companies are growing in number – companies where profits are not even sufficient to cover debt servicing costs so they have to borrow even more to survive.  But the traditional process of ‘cleansing’ of the weak under capitalism through a slump has been avoided by yet more injections of credit (loans and bonds).  The Federal Reserve balance sheet rose during banking crisis (graph).  ‘Creative destruction’ has been replaced by ‘moral hazard’ as monetary policy.

Interestingly, my post on pensions got into the top ten.  The story was built around the pension cut protests in France last March.  Pensions are not just important to older people but also to young workers – with the knowledge that state pensions will never be adequate on retirement. 

In the post I opposed the mainstream economic arguments that ‘we cannot afford proper state pensions’ any more unless we raise the retirement age and/or contributions from wages.  I put it this way: “Does a country want to use its resources so that people can stop work at the age of 60 or 65 and have enough income to live on in reasonable comfort, or not?  It can be done.”  It depends on two things: first, that an economy creates enough resources and expands sufficiently to cater for its elderly population that may also be getting larger as a share of the population.  And second, given finite resources, decent pensions can be provided by cutting out other calls on government revenues i.e. such as bailing out the banks; increased arms spending; more subsidies for private corporations to invest in fossil fuels; and lower taxes for top earners and corporations etc. 

Indeed, just a 1% pt sustained rise in average real GDP per capita in the major economies could deliver enough extra revenue to governments to easily maintain current pension levels and terms with something to spare.

The Israeli horrendous decimation of Gaza starting last October compelled me to write something about the economic rise of the Israeli state.  I called it ‘a shattering of a dream’ – I now think that was a wrong title because, even back in 1947, those who thought Israel would build a model democratic socialist state were a naïve minority.  The driving force for Israel from the beginning was capitalist investment to establish a bulwark for imperialism in the Middle East.  But I did outline the economic story of Israel for readers, particularly the huge inequalities or wealth and income within Israel.

The last post to make the top ten was the recent one of the debate between two Marxist scholars on Marx’s meaning of a ‘commodity’ and the implications for understanding the contradictions of within the capitalist mode of production.  The comments on the blog continue.

Just to finish, you might want to know what the top post of all time was on the blog. The winner was the post on global wealth inequality (repeated every year) showing a pyramid with the top 1% of wealth holders (about 50m) having 40-45% of all net personal wealth globally, while around 3bn adults in the world have next to nothing.  Not far behind were my posts on the economics of the pandemic, a Marxist theory of inflation, the debate I had with David Harvey on Marx’s value theory, measurement of the rate of profit on capital and my critique of modern monetary theory. 

You can find these posts through the search tab on the blog.