A people’s guide to capitalism

It is not easy explaining relatively complex ideas in a simple and clear manner.  Ask any teacher.  It’s a skill lacking in many.  Hadas Thier has brilliantly succeeded in that challenge with her book introducing Marxist economics.  She has delivered a clear, straightforward and entertaining explanation of all Marx’s basic theoretical insights into the nature

COVID and the trade-off

Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic took off, I ventured into an analysis of its health and economic impact.  As I said at the time, “It is a risky thing to start analysing the COVID stats and coming up with some conclusions at this still early stage of the pandemic.  It is even riskier for

The IMF smokescreen

In its latest World Economic Outlook report, the IMF again tackled the issue of climate change, global warming and what to do about it.  As it did last year, the IMF recognised that climate change was a burning issue for humanity and the planet.  But this time it claimed that there were policy options that

A prize auction

This year’s ‘Nobel’ (actually the Riksbank) prize for economics went to Stanford University economists, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson.  According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they “have studied how auctions work. They have also used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a

Debt disaster with no escape

The IMF-World Bank semi-annual meeting starts this week.  Earlier the IMF kicked off the show with a warning that the poor countries of the world are heading for a catastrophe from the pandemic slump, leading to defaults on the debts that their governments and companies owe to investors and banks in the ‘global north’. According

Work or toil in the pandemic

The pandemic has opened up a Pandora’s box about the future of work.  The slump has caused a huge loss of jobs, hours and earnings, particularly for those who are in all sorts of service sectors, like retail, entertainment, leisure, events, food preparation etc and it is driving thousands of small businesses surviving on small

Ending the pandemic slump – a return to Keynes?

The latest Trade and Development report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the economic research agency to help ‘developing countries’, is a must read.  Not only is it packed with data and statistics about trends and developments in global production, trade and investment, but this 2020 issue takes a very radical

More on a world rate of profit

Back in July, I wrote a post on a new approach to a world rate of profit and how to measure it.  I won’t go over the arguments again as you can read that post and previous ones on the subject.  But in that July post, I said I would follow up on the decomposition

The US rate of profit before the COVID

Every year, I look at measuring the US rate of profit. Official US data are now available to update the measurement of the rate for 2019. There are many ways to measure the rate of profit (for the various ways, see http://pinguet.free.fr/basu2012.pdf).  I have one way and you can check and replicate my results by

Pandemics: prevention before cure

There is now firm evidence of a strong link between environmental destruction and the increased emergence of deadly new diseases such as Covid-19.  Indeed, increasing numbers of deadly new pandemics will afflict the planet if levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss continue at their current catastrophic rates.  That is the conclusion of scientists who will