From the Mirrlees Review we get this chart. Showing the true and vile cost of neoliberalism:
As the Senior Lecturer tells us:
If you want an explanation of the consequence of neoliberalism that’s it: over the thirty years when it ran rampant the higher your income was the larger the increase in it was too.
Quite terrible that inequality increased.
Of course, we can view this another way. Neoliberalism led to the real incomes of 95% of the population rising by more than 50%.…
See MoreDani Rodrik, Gabriel Zucman and Suresh Naidu have a new project out, one to provide us with an economics to replace neoliberalism. That neoliberalism they define as market fundamentalism. Sadly, they’re wrong.
Yes, I know, brave words from a mere journalistic scribbler to leading contemporary economists, at least one of which I’m reasonably certain will end up with a share of a Nobel at some point. And yet still true.
Rodrik introduces it here. The Boston Review piece.…
See MoreEthiopia didn’t have a good economic time of it in the recent past. That leap from Haile Selassie’s monarchical feudalism to Mengistu’s Red Terror didn’t work well. As every communist theoretician prior to Lenin insisted of course, it was necessary for there to be an urban proletariat before the urban proletariat took power. Lenin changing his mind because he saw the opportunity for power in a country that didn’t really have that prior requirement but he sure wanted the power.…
See MoreThis is the one great achievement of the last half century. It is entirely and absolutely astonishing, we’ve just seen the biggest reduction in absolute poverty in the entire history of our species. And it’s not just that people are moving up to that second stale crust a day – we’ve got to where half of all of us now enjoy those bourgeois pleasures of three squares, a change of clothes and a roof overhead. We are actually solving the grand economic question, how do we all get rich?…
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