February 2012
17 posts
Steve Waldman, "Restraining unit labor costs is a... →
A terrific post that is highly relevant to the European debate on “competitiveness”.
Vicenç Navarro, "Salarios y competitividad" →
“Una postura sostenida por las élites gobernantes de la Unión Europea (UE), tales como el Consejo Europeo liderado por el binomio Merkel-Sarkozy, la Comisión Europea y el Banco Central Europeo, así como por los partidos conservadores que hoy gobiernan la mayoría de países del tal comunidad, es que los estados periféricos de la eurozona deben su estancamiento económico a un excesivo...
Peter Tatchell, "Economic democracy - The next big... →
Via Compass:
“One element of a sounder and more just economy is greater economic democracy: more participation, transparency, decentralisation and accountability. Here are a few ideas on how to begin the structural transformation of the economy:…”
The Onion - Tom Brady Cruelly Consolidates Power... →
“While acknowledging Tom Brady’s decision to betroth his sister Julie to savage, lecherous Kevin Youkilis may be morally repugnant on a personal level, Boston sports analysts said Thursday the move should consolidate the superstar’s power over the region’s fans….”Youkilis may not be a strategic genius, but he is powerful and unpredictable, and it’s better...
La omisión del BCE
Una traducción de mi última entrada para el Social Europe Journal:
El objetivo principal del BCE es mantener la estabilidad de precios, y mide la estabilidad de precios en términos del Índice de Precios de Consumo Armonizado (IPCA).[1] Como el principal indicador europeo de la inflación, el IPCA es por lo tanto un variable extremadamente importante para las políticas públicas.
Debido a las...
Ian Millhiser, "Josiah Bartlet Was A Mediocre... →
“President Bartlet had his moments — they just rarely had much to do with economic justice. Bartlet was a strong supporter of both gay rights and reproductive freedom, for example, and he deserves credit for negotiating a peace between Israel and Palestine. Ultimately, however, his presidency advances a very small kind of liberalism that appeals mostly to people who’ve never worried if they...
George Monbiot, "The Big Green Question" →
“…providing enough food for the 13% of the world’s people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.
Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.
Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.
In other words, it is not the needs of...
Neal Lawson, "David Miliband's approach won't save... →
“Labour is in what Gramsci called an “interregnum”. The old is not yet dead, the new is not yet born. One paradigm needs to give way to the new. Only Labour can determine how long its interregnum lasts - it can be painful and partial or more quickly and fully resolved. The party can be blighted for decades by a generation of politicians who refuse to admit they got it wrong. In...
Michael Ehrmann and David-Jan Jansen, "The Pitch... →
From an ECB working paper:
“At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many soccer matches were played during stock market trading hours, providing us with a natural experiment to analyze fluctuations in investor attention. Using minute‐by‐minute trading data for fifteen international stock exchanges, we present three key findings. First, when the national team...
Dani Rodrik and Roberto Mangabeira Unger -... →
“This course will explore alternative ways of thinking about contemporary market economies and their reconstruction. It will do so by addressing three connected themes: the worldwide financial and economic crisis and the response to it, the effort to advance socially inclusive economic growth in richer as well as in poorer countries, and the past, present, and future of globalization. In...
Antonio Roldán, "El trilema de Europa" →
El amigo Toni ha publicado un gran artículo a El País:
“La crisis ha hecho emerger una de las verdades fundamentales de la Unión Monetaria Europea: la de la incompatibilidad entre las exigencias de la hiperglobalización económica y financiera y las demandas democráticas nacionales. Si queremos evitar vivir en una Europa posdemocrática, parafraseando a Havel, debemos entender que una Unión...
David S. Miller, "The Zuckerberg Tax" →
From the NY Times:
“A mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years. The new revenue could be used to lower payroll taxes, extend the George W. Bush tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, reduce the budget deficit, prevent military cuts or a combination of all of these.
This tax...
“It is no mystery that the Pope’s acts and words can enrage...”
– So claimed a rogue priest according to The Telegraph.
The Rise of the Indignados and the Collapse of...
I wrote this piece in November at the request of a few of my friends from JUSOS in Germany. I am happy to see that it has now been translated here:
On the 20th of November, the Partido Popular (PP) won a convincing majority in Spain’s general elections. The socialists (PSOE) suffered their worst defeat since the return of democracy to Spain. With only a few exceptions, the Spanish right now...
Joseph Stiglitz, "Capturing the ECB" →
From Project Syndicate: “The ECB’s behavior should not be surprising: as we have seen elsewhere, institutions that are not democratically accountable tend to be captured by special interests. That was true before 2008; unfortunately for Europe – and for the global economy – the problem has not been adequately addressed since then.”
January 2012
15 posts
Javier Solana, "Austerity vs. Europe" →
“Austerity at all costs is a flawed strategy, and it will not work. We cannot allow a misconceived notion of “discipline” to cause lasting damage to our economies and inflict a terrible human toll on our societies. All of Europe must agree on a short-term growth strategy – and implement it quickly.”
Brad DeLong, "The British Economy is Now Doing... →
“In less than a year, if current forecasts come true, the Cameron-Osborne Depression will not be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but the worst depression in Britain… probably ever…
Policy makers elsewhere in the world take note: starving yourself is no road to health, and pushing unemployment higher now is no road to market confidence.”
A few links on debt and deleveraging
Robert Skidelsky, “Does Debt Matter?”:
…deficit reduction is at the center of most governments’ fiscal policy today. A government with a “credible” plan for “fiscal consolidation” supposedly is less likely to default on its debt, or leave it for the future to pay. This will, it is thought, enable the government to borrow money more cheaply than it would otherwise be able to do,...
Martin Feldstein, "How to Create a Depression" →
“European political leaders may be about to agree to a fiscal plan which, if implemented, could push Europe into a major depression.”
Slavoj Žižek, "The Revolt of the Salaried... →
From the LRB:
A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse....
Vicenç Navarro, "¿Salirse del euro?" →
“Es importante que para el bien de las clases populares se inicie un debate en España sobre los excesivos costes de pertenecer al euro, y de los que la población parece ser ya consciente. Según una reciente encuesta, el 70% de la población española tiene mayores reservas hacia el euro. ¿Cuándo se iniciará tal debate en España?”
Vicenç Navarro ha iniciado aquí en España un debate muy...
de la Cultura Tributaria: Asfixiados* →
culturatributaria:
*Amb il·lusió
Se ha hablado bastante de lo que va a suponer para las clases medias (a pesar de que todavía no tengo muy claro que son las clases medias) la subida del IRPF aprobada por el Gobierno y refrendada ayer en el Congreso. No es que no quiera hablar de ese tema, seguro que hablaré,…
Kant on Greece
Via Zero Hedge comes a reminder that Greece is spending bailout money on weapons purchases.
Here’s a snippet from Kant’s Perpetual Peace:
4. “National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States”
This expedient of seeking aid within or without the state is above suspicion when the purpose is domestic economy (e.g., the improvement of...
Per un partit d'activistes, cal un partit...
La excel·lent reflexió d’ Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí per la Fundació Ideas, titulada “Otro modelo de partido es posible” em va animar a actualitzar aquests continguts: [1]
Per un partit d’activistes, cal un partit activista
L’acte típic de final de campanya és un gran míting que en teoria ha de tenir una gran repercussió mediàtica. Parem-nos a pensar per un moment en els números....
John Quiggin, "The End of the Nuclear Renaissance" →
“The average retail price of solar cells as monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation. More...
Dean Baker and John Schmitt, "The bogus case... →
From Salon:
“Higher minimum wages are a simple and effective mechanism for helping the lowest-paid workers. It is also important to remember this is not new ground. In the prosperous decades immediately following World War II, the minimum wage was actually higher than it is today. Adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage would have to rise to about $9 an hour to reach its peak level in...
Center for American Progress - 20 Ideas for Job... →
El fin del fin de la Historia en Europa
Las ventas navideñas colapsaron en Grecia esta temporada. Esto es un indicador superficial de la situación que padecen once millones de nuestros conciudadanos europeos. Otros síntomas de la crisis son más graves:
Hospitales alejando a mujeres embarazadas
Un aumento en la desnutrición infantil
Padres abandonando a sus hijos a causa de su pobreza
Un aumento enorme en la tasa de suicidio
Un...
December 2011
10 posts
Richard Koo, " The world in balance sheet... →
“One way to solve this eurozone-specific problem of capital shifts would be to prohibit member nations from selling government bonds to investors from other countries. Allowing only the citizens of a nation to hold that government’s debt would, for example, prevent the investment of Spanish savings in German government debt. Most of the Spanish savings that have been used to buy other...
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new...”
– Antonio Gramsci (not writing about 2011)
Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, " Otro modelo de partido es... →
Un artículo de la Fundación Ideas que vale mucho la pena.
Luis de Guindos Jurado, "La Política Económica... →
Con este artículo de 2005, el nuevo Ministro de Economía nos promete una espiral de deuda y deflación:
“La pérdida de la autonomía monetaria conlleva que el nivel de tipos de interés vigente en la zona euro se ajustará a las necesidades de la misma, y no tiene que ser el que más nos convenga en cada momento, puesto que España sólo alcanza a suponer una porción reducida del conjunto del...
David Lizoain, "La importancia de los números... →
Los amigos de la nueva web de “La idea federal” me han publicado este artículo:
“Las más espléndidas fantasías independentistas nos apuntan la importancia de un catalanismo integrador y unos planteamientos serios sobre la solidaridad intrarregional. No es posible huir de la realidad inventando unos números que más convienen.”
Dalia Ben-Galim, "Making the Case for Universal... →
A piece of required reading from the IPPR.
“This paper makes the economic case for universal childcare for preschool-aged children. On the basis of new cost-benefit analysis, we show that universal childcare pays a return to the government of £20,050 (over four years) in terms of tax revenue minus the cost of childcare for every woman who returns to full-time employment after one year of...
Fiscal Space
An interesting graphic from Moody’s via Ryan Avent:
The Guardian - Could the desert sun power the... →
Post-euro currencies
A fascinating image via FT Alphaville:
November 2011
15 posts
David Lizoain, "Recuperar la ambición" →
Unas reflexiones sobre la socialdemocrácia que me han publicado en Público.
John Schmitt and Alexandra Mitukiewic, "Politics... →
A new paper worth checking out from the CEPR, which serves as another rebuttal of the idea that there is no alternative:
“If the decline in unionization is the inevitable response to the twin forces of globalization and technology, then we would expect unionization rates to follow a similar path in countries subjected to roughly similar levels of globalization and technology.
Instead, for...
Simon Tilford and Philip Whyte, "Why stricter... →
An interesting piece from the Centre for European Reform:
“Eurozone leaders now face a choice between two unpalatable alternatives. Either they accept that the eurozone is institutionally flawed and do what is necessary to turn it into a more stable arrangement. This will require some of them to go beyond what their voters seem prepared to allow, and to accept that a certain amount of...
La magnitud de la crisis de empleo en España
A través de Calculated Risk, se pueden ver unos gráficos magníficos demostrando que la crisis actual es la peor en los EEUU desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial. He preparado algo similar para el caso español, con los datos de INE.
Podemos comprobar que la destrucción de empleo durante esta crisis ha sido la más abrupta desde la Transición.
No obstante el panorama tan negro, creo que vale la pena...
The New Economics Foundation - Ten Reasons to Care... →
The 1% in Canada
The data stop at 2000, but the tendency towards an increased concentration of wealth continues.
As the authorities crack down on Occupy protesters, we can recall that this is nothing new. My friends Tom Malleson and David Wachsmuth are the editors of a new book, “Whose Streets? The Toronto G20 and the Challenges of Summit Protest” that is worth checking out. Featuring a Foreword...