Economy

China spends more on importing computer chips – $260 billion in 2017 – than it does importing oil. President Biden’s recent bans on the export of American-made chips to China as well as a ban on companies throughout the world using American technology to export to China intends to make --->> read more -->>

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Here is a book review I posted on markorton.com 3.24.2001 When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor – book review When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor Book Review: William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The --->> read more -->>

Original posting – 3.6.2023 Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, has a new book Poverty, by America set to be released shortly. He has written a piece for the NYTimes, “Why Poverty Persists in America” that is worth a read. He poses this question --->> read more -->>

Today, March 14, 2023 is Equal Pay Day “This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.” Women have to work a fifth of a year longer to make it to the same pay as men. The wage gap --->> read more -->>

Financialization is an awful word. It sounds clumsy in the mouth and refers to a process that has been underway for over 40 years but is nearly unknown to most of us. Before we get to Norfolk Southern, the railroad company, what is financialization? Basically, financialization is a nested set --->> read more -->>

Here are two more angers: (an addendum to the 1.1.2023 post: My Year End Siege of Angers – the list) Guns:  “Eighteen percent of U.S. households purchased a gun since the start of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2022), according to new survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago, increasing --->> read more -->>

Yesterday as I was taking a walk up and down Warren St. here in Hudson I realized that I had become actively angry about the state of the US and the world. I walked past hotels where a single room would set you back $400 for a night or you --->> read more -->>

Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights representing more than 80%of all cancellations during the Christmas 2022 snowstorm. The scale of this service implosion led to stories about old software systems for managing passenger bookings and flight schedules. Then, discussions of Southwest’s point-to-point flight strategy that differs from the other major --->> read more -->>

The work to revise and expand my 2018 essay “Capitalism – a critique” has entered its final stages. A final draft has been distributed to a number of readers for comment and critique. I am now working on a book version. Capitalism – the actual workings – is the new working --->> read more -->>

Ban inequality – the word, the naked word, from our political rhetoric. Inequality is everywhere around us in the media sphere as well as in our day-to-day conversations. Amongst progressive folk one can drop the word like an F bomb and summon up agreeable outrage in one’s interlocutors without saying --->> read more -->>

An introduction to monopolies and book review of Zephyr Teachout’s new book Break’Em Up: recovering our freedom from big ag, big tech, and big money, All Points Books, 2020. What are monopolies? How monopolized (concentrated) is the US economy Examples of how monopolization works and its effects The history of --->> read more -->>

If you are struggling to get your head around how racism works you will probably find it helpful to have a general framework as a guide. This one hour lecture from 2017 features an overview by Brown University Professor Tricia Rose of the structure of racism and how it works --->> read more -->>

Kristof and WuDunn’s book, Tightrope – Americans Reaching for Hope, spent some weeks on bestseller lists. Kristof is a well known reporter and writer for the NYTimes. It centers around the town of Yamhill OR and the people that Kristof grew up among. The stories of industrial decline, increasing inequality, --->> read more -->>

[1]When Congress passed the second pandemic stimulus bill, the CARES Act, in late March, a key feature was the Paycheck Protection Program(PPP). This was $349 billion described as targeted to small businesses (in the world of the Federal government small businesses have long been defined as having fewer than 500 --->> read more -->>

Human beings have always been attracted to images. From early cave paintings to traveling displays of giant canvases by the Hudson River school of painters to TV and on now into the ubiquity of images in the digital era, we pay attention. Marketers have known this and exploited it to --->> read more -->>

“Who Killed the Knapp Family?” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn appeared in the Sunday 1/12/2020 NYTimes. This essay which is adapted from a newly published book by the same authors, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, explores the grim reality of life in one small corner of America, Yamhill, OR --->> read more -->>

We generally don’t report or comment on local affairs here at AmericanDelusions. But, the craziness of real estate development in Greenport, the town that surrounds our hometown of Hudson, illustrates a downside of our market centered economy working in an environment where whatever the market wants it gets. The Greenport Planning --->> read more -->>

It will be no surprise to regular readers of AmericanDelusions that we are skeptical of markets and even more so claims made for markets. So, it was a pleasure to read the recent op-ed piece by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, “Economic --->> read more -->>

The Visual Capitalist added another graphic example of the increasing concentration, monopolization, of markets, in this case for groceries. Even here in Hudson NY we can see the impact of Walmart locally. Two years ago we had three large supermarkets within 4 miles. Price Chopper gave up the ghost leaving --->> read more -->>

Robert Reich is continuing his series of brief YouTube videos on progressive view of the economy. This is a good introduction to the arguments for re-invigorating our protections against monopolies. However, the problem is much more widespread than just the high tech industry. We’ve written about this broader phenomenon in --->> read more -->>

The May 9th NYTimes has an Op-Ed essay, It’s Time to Break Up Facebook, by Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, calling on the government to break up that company. The essay is very thorough in describing the current monopoly behavior of Facebook, the deleterious effects on competition and vigor in --->> read more -->>

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