Corporate concentration of income and wealth are core features of capitalism. From its earliest cheerleaders like Adam Smith, the drive for corporations to get ever larger and in the doing drive their competitors out of the market was noted and warned against. John Oliver provides a thorough and amusing introduction.
A Note on Jobs & Unemployment Original publication date – 12/27/2016; Revised – 12/31/2017 As the presidential campaign of 2016 fades away and the Trump Era begins, we find a national scene without any real discussion of the facts of jobs and unemployment and what the future might bring. Trump and others talk about bringing…
Trump and Republicans (and some Democrats) puff up the return of well-paid manufacturing jobs and toss about ideas that thirty years of globalization can be reversed by renegotiating NAFTA and other trade agreements. All the while one of the most important factors in the disappearance of jobs, automation and robots are taking away jobs in…
Report from Economic Innovation Group shows that US economy is becoming less dynamic and more focused around a few geographic regions. Recovery from Great 2008-09 Recession accelerated this process.
The impact of globalization on the US economy has been mostly cast by the media and politicians in light of the disappearance of many manufacturing jobs and the swarms of cheap products imported to fill our stores. We should not think that just because we invented the internet and most of its prominent toys that…
Trickle-down economics has never worked, yet once again it is being used to justify tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Trump and Republicans are once again using this thoroughly debunked theory to justify tax cuts.
The US economy is still the largest in he world and it makes us one of the richest nations on earth. We think of it as the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced in the world. The trends of the last decade show that there is much to be concerned about.
Keystone Essay What Is Market Capitalism and Why Do We Need to Understand It? (download a PDF version) Whether one envisions market capitalism as a coherent set of processes with a managing elite at the helm or as just important economic features of the overall human landscape, it long ago became a dominant feature of…
The title of this short book, only 130 pages, Building the New American Economy: smart, fair, & sustainable by Jeffrey D. Sachs with a foreword by Bernie Sanders (Columbia University Press, 2017) is unfortunately misleading. There is much here about the new economy. The misleading part is that there is very little about its construction,…
Reading this op ed leaves one with the notion that these changes have arisen through some immutable forces of nature.
He fails to mention that in parallel with the individual being more and more alone in the world, big corporations and governments are becoming ever more well integrated, feeding at each others’ troughs.
