• About
  • The Poetry of Protest

Show Me Progress

~ covering government and politics in Missouri – since 2007

Show Me Progress

Tag Archives: economics

Who explains Keynes to the masses?

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by Michael Bersin in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

economics, Free to Choose, Johan Norberg, Keynes, Milton Friedman, missouri, TV

Tonight St. Louis TV Channel 9-3, one of the set of PBS channels now available, will run an update of the free-market propaganda series, Free to Choose, created by Chicago School economist and Nobel prize winner, Milton Friedman and his wife Rose in the 1980s. According to tonight’s program description, Cato Institute scholar, Johan Norberg, will attempt to interpret recent events such as economic globalization and the 2008 financial crises from the point of view of Friedman’s radical free market ideology.

In case you think I’m up in arms about this program given its conservative economic bias, I most emphatically am not. Anyone who would watch a program on economic theory at 7:00 p.m. on a lovely labor day weekend, is either already a true believer or more than capable of evaluating the content all by themselves. I intend to watch because I expect I will enjoy parsing the claims Norberg will put forward and I wish more people would do the same. The only unregulated markeplace I do unequivocally approve of is the one referred to (ad nauseaum perhaps) as the marketplace of ideas, and I assume that that is where this program will be located.

What I am doing, though, is asking if there is any parallel effort to present popular expositions of other economic theories that perhaps counter the free-market religion that Friedman promulgated in his later years, and that his acolytes, such as Norberg, continue to promote. To illustrate how overdue such an effort is, some time ago, I put up on this blog a short YouTube video in which random folks attending a political rally are asked if the president is a Keynesian. To a person, they all protested that no, indeed, the president was certainly born in the U.S.!

I do wonder, of course, if there will be any effort to demonstrate balance in this program? Friedman was a great economist whose mathematical approach to the behavior of consumers rightly earned him his Nobel. But as Paul Krugman, also a Nobel prize winner, observes (in an essay that has driven several on the right to apoplexy) that:

There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism-finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

On the topic of these diverse aspects of the economist, he adds:

… there’s an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

I haven’t seen tonight’s program yet, but, given the little I know about Norberg, I doubt that there will be much balance in the presentation. I am sure that the distinctions that Krugman makes will probably be ignored.  I may be pleasantly surprised, but whether I am or not, I would just love to learn that there is a good popular explanation of Keynes’ theories out there that could also be broadcast, a corrective to the Friedmanesque ideology with which we are now saturated. If it exists, please let me know, but if it doesn’t, isn’t there some foundation or something somewhere that could address the need to present economic education, from all points of view, in a popular, easily accessible format?

 

Still Questioning Growth: 'I Want You To Imagine A World'

17 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by Michael Bersin in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

climate change, economics, global warming, Sustainable Development, Tim Jackson

Crossposted from Antemedius

“Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.”

“The only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession.”

— Tim Jackson

British Economist Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.

He currently serves as the economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission and is director of RESOLVE – a Research group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment. After five years as Senior Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Jackson became Professor of Sustainable Development at University of Surrey, and was the first person to hold that title at a UK university.

He founded RESOLVE in May 2006 as an inter-disciplinary collaboration across four areas – CES, psychology, sociology and economics – aiming to develop an understanding of the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment.

In 2009 Jackson published “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet”, a substantially revised and updated version of Jackson’s controversial study (.PDF, 136 pp.) for the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK Government. The study rapidly became the most downloaded report in the Commission’s nine year history when it was launched in 2009.

Filmed at TEDGlobal 2010, here is Tim Jackson’s economic reality check, a 20 minute talk he gave for the TEDGlobal audience…

I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question — and we’ll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each years as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart. On the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It’s around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It’s a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we’ve ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it’s possible — who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we’re going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement?

http://www.antemedius.com/files/flvplayer.swf

full transcript here…  

On May 16, 2009 a collaboration between the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London released the first UCL Lancet Commission report, assessing the impact of global warming on global health, and on populations.

Titled Managing the health effects of climate change (.PDF), the year long study highlights the threat of climate change on patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. The report also highlights the action required by global society to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

“Climate change,” the report concludes, “is the biggest global health threat of the 21 century.”

The report presents the two distorted maps shown below  – density equalizing cartograms depicting a comparison of undepleted CO2 emissions by country for 1950-2000 versus the regional distribution of four climate sensitive health consequences (malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and inland flood-related fatalities).



expand image

The first image shows the world in terms of carbon emissions. America, for instance, is huge. So is China. And Europe. Africa is hardly visible.

The second map shows the world in terms of increased mortality — that is to say, deaths — from climate change. Suddenly, America virtually disappears. So does Europe. Africa, however, is grotesquely distended. South Asia inflates.

In Barack Obama’s commencement address Sunday May 17, 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Obama exhorted the graduates to recognize that “that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a ‘single garment of destiny.'” and “Your generation must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it.”

But the peoples of the world are not bound equally.

“Loss of healthy life years as a result of global environmental change (including climate change) is predicted to be 500 times greater in poor African populations than in European populations,” states the UCL Lancet Commission report bluntly.

In other words, for every million deaths related to climate change in Europe – and North America, btw – there will be five hundred million deaths in Africa and other countries.

……….

I have feet. They were free.

And though they sometimes smell, they don’t pollute.

Since the human race doesn’t seem to be able to get it together on using our heads, maybe if we all got together and used our feet more often, we wouldn’t have so many problems to think about?

The president is not a Keynesian … he was born right here in the U.S.A.

03 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by Michael Bersin in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Birthers, Claire McCaskill, economics, Keynesian economic theory, missouri, political humor

Ever wonder how Republicans (and Democrats like Claire McCaskill) get away with their stupidity and/or duplicity on the subject of the deficit, spending cuts and the stimulus? This video should give you an idea about what’s going on:

And you wonder why Americans can be so easily stampeded on economic issues that they’d return the folks to Washington who crashed our economy just because the clowns promised to do the same things they did before? Did I tell you, Roy Blunt is going to the Senate?  

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007

Categories

  • campaign finance
  • Claire McCaskill
  • Democratic Party News
  • Healthcare
  • Hillary Clinton
  • Interview
  • Josh Hawley
  • media criticism
  • meta
  • Missouri General Assembly
  • Missouri Governor
  • Missouri House
  • Missouri Senate
  • Resist
  • Roy Blunt
  • social media
  • Standing Rock
  • Town Hall
  • Uncategorized
  • US Senate

Meta

  • Log in

Blogroll

  • Balloon Juice
  • Crooks and Liars
  • Digby
  • I Spy With My Little Eye
  • Lawyers, Guns, and Money
  • No More Mister Nice Blog
  • The Great Orange Satan
  • Washington Monthly
  • Yael Abouhalkah

Donate to Show Me Progress via PayPal

Your modest support helps keep the lights on. Click on the button:

Blog Stats

  • 392,138 hits

Powered by WordPress.com.