Krugman is correct that not having a sovereign currency is a risk and that Scotland would be far better off recovering all aspects of sovereignty, including its once sovereign currency. That is politically impossible in Scotland (as it is in Ecuador as I have explained previously).
What Krugman does not explain, however, is that Scotland already lacks a sovereign currency because it lacks sovereignty and is part of a “union” in which it is a small, permanent, and often scorned minority. Regardless of the vote on independence Scotland will lack a sovereign currency. The English have a sovereign currency, the Pound, and they have had at all times under the “Union” the votes to set the UK’s economic and currency policies. Scotland was helpless to prevent the insane austerity that crippled Scotland’s recovery from the Great Recession and forced it back into a gratuitous second recession.
</spoiler-alert>
I have not been following the situation in Scotland at all, but any time Bill Black takes Paul Krugman to task, it is worth reading.
Of course, I suppose I have put up a spoiler as the quote. In the article Black tantalizes with hints as to what is wrong with what Krugman says. It is the anticipation of waiting for him to actually state the case that makes the article such a good read.
Is it really more important to watch football than it is to vote in the primary? This primary has people who want to curb domestic violence. Voting for them might be better than watching the next 16 football games.
I cannot judge a woman’s reasons for defending her abuser. However, society cannot allow it’s safety to be compromised by the victim’s decisions.
The turnout of voters between 7AM and 9AM was abysmal. I also found out that in order for OSV to allow us to hold the Sturbridge elections at their facilities, we must give up certain of our free speech rights. These are the very kind of limits struck down by the recent Supreme Court decision on another Massachusetts law that imposed buffer zones inside which people could not exercise their free speech.
I think Sturbridge needs to find another place to hold its elections. I also think that ordinary citizens ought to have as many free speech rights as abortion protesters now have. Are abortion protesters a new protected class that has more rights than I do?
Ever wonder how police became soldiers? With the 1033 Programs, “Protect and Serve” Became “Search and Destroy”
When you see how the federal government spent the money, you have to wonder where were the deficit hawks when we needed them? (As if we ever really needed them.)
If Federal law enforcement backs down in the face of Cliven Bundy, but provides materials for this kind of attack on unarmed citizens, what lesson does this give you? Is the Federal government telling us that we’d better come armed if we want them to pay attention to us? What kind of lesson is this that they are delivering?
It goes along with the message we deliver internationally. If you want to be taken seriously by the U.S., you’d better be armed with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, we’ll feel free to bomb you, drone you, and occupy you. So who are the countries acting rationally in the face of our threat? The ones that eschew nuclear weapons, or the ones that try to obtain them? Are we sending the wrong message?
The Boston Globe has a story today Management claims, not visions, divide Democrats. They may be right about two of the candidates running for Governor in the Democratic Primary on Tuesday, but they couldn’t be more wrong about Don Berwick.
I commented on the article.
There may be constraints on running a campaign that prevent Don Berwick’s vision from showing through. If that’s what it is, then it is a shame.
I have made a public challenge to readers of my blog. I defy them to watch “The Hubie Jones Lecture in Urban Health featuring Dr. Donald Berwick” and come away from that experience without knowing this is the guy we need for governor.
The lecture is on YouTube, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mffFJpgjmxg. If you don’t have the patience to watch introductions, skip ahead to the 11th minute. Don starts speaking shortly after that.
If enough people watched the video and spread the word before Tuesday, this election could be turned around. If Don Berwick does not win the primary and people eventually figure out what they missed they will slap their foreheads and say, “Gee, I should have voted for Don Berwick.” Don’t let that happen to you.
As I commented on my previous post about this video, The Hubie Jones Lecture in Urban Health featuring Dr. Donald Berwick, not very many of you have taken up my challenge. If only another 10 of you watched the video, and spread the word, we might have a chance of turning this around before Tuesday.
What have you got to lose, 90 minutes of your life? You could gain one of the greatest governors Massachusetts has seen in a long time by putting in that 90 minutes and spreading the word. It might even be a more important choice then the one you made when you decided to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
I like the CORE slogan: “Teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened.”
Besides discussing the content of the course, Rajiv Sethi remarked,
But far more important than the content innovations in the book are the process innovations. The material was developed collaboratively by a large team, and made coherent through a careful editing process. It is released under a creative commons license, so that any user can customize, translate, or improve it for their own use or the use of their students. Most importantly, we see this initial product not as a stand-alone text, but rather as the foundation on which an entire curriculum can be built. We can imagine the development of units that branch off into various fields (for use in topics courses), as well as the incorporation of more advanced material eventually making its way into graduate education.
I am going to look at the materials online to see what I can learn about what is new in the field of economics since I first studied it over 50 years ago.
One reader of the article made the comment,
I would say if economist could agree on terminology it would correct the problem of difference of opinion on what is or is not the cause of a problem.
I don’t think it is nearly that simple.
Agreeing on what is or is not the cause of a problem may be a pipe dream for now. The response to a cause is usually delayed by an indeterminate amount of time. The economy is a highly complex, non-linear system with many causes and reactions happening at the same time. The economy, as in any other activity involving humans, is made up of people who read the explanations of what they are doing, and can change their behavior depending on what they learn from what is said about them. This is Soros’s reflexive property.
You can build a complex model of the system, and see if the model behaves the way the real world does. That still does not prove that the model has got the causes correctly identified. If another model with different causes (or different emphasis on causes) also matched reality as well as the first model, that would just show that the definition of the causes that will match reality is not unique. How could one decide which model was more correct than the other?
Only if you can find a model that uniquely matches reality with outstanding accuracy, far and away better than other models, do you have the beginning of the ability to say that you can identify causes with any certainty. This is a goal to which economists ought to aspire.
Well, I have read the first few paragraphs of the book. My initial reaction is that this is one of the biggest piles of crap I have ever read. It jumps to bold conclusions based on averages that do not represent much of anything. A few outliers in the data are so far away from the average, that the average itself is skewed. This is not a good way to start teaching anybody about making rational analyses about anything.
In the article Bill Black, who worked for the defense pro bono, explained the following:
And so it was a very bizarre thing, in which the defense attorneys were presenting a prosecution case against the elite bankers and the institutions and how they were run, while the Justice Department was trying to defend three lenders that it knew were front-to-back frauds and indeed are on the list of the worst of the worst lenders, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. So everything was reversed during the trial.
If our President is a closet socialist, why is his justice department prosecuting the victims rather than the vulture capitalists? Is this his way of staying in the closet?
Twenty-nine hundred American companies at least–and, you know, unlike other things, we don’t have great statistics on this. You have to go dig out every deal and find the records. Well, at least 2,900 large companies in America, including many foreign companies, get to keep the state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks. The worker has the state income taxes withheld: you get your paycheck, you made x dollars, and this, this, this, this gets sliced off. The company doesn’t turn over the state income taxes. The state lets them keep it. There are hundreds of thousands of workers covered by this.
Warning <sarcasm>
In this era of privatization, why shouldn’t companies collect taxes from us and keep the proceeds?
I did a Google search of this topic – corporations keep state income tax. I only looked at the first page of the results. I didn’t find a reference that didn’t eventually lead back to David Cay Johnston. FWIW.
I am sputtering in such outrage at the story these interviews tell, that I haven’t go the time to put in the videos into this post the way I usually do for posts like this.
All I can calm down long enough to do is to quote one question and answer from the third video.
JAY: So what’s the consequence of this? We’ve gone from where there was at least some chipping away at some of the big estates–I take your point; it was porous, it wasn’t ever big chipping away. The big estates remain very big. But even that much chipping away is more or less gone now. What does that mean to country?
JOHNSTON: Well, what it means is the reason people don’t have jobs, the reason that the median wage is stuck at the same level since 1998 and the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966–look at my gray hair; I was in high school in 1966, and that’s where 90 percent of Americans have fallen back to–is this incredible concentration of wealth in very, very few hands at the top. We have created a system does that isn’t trickle-down. The Democrats invented that to denigrate Nixon, it’ll trickle down. No, it’s Amazon[the river]-up. We take from the many to give to the super-rich.
As Paul Jay said in a video-conference that I participated in today, he has had people tell him that the number of stories that they get on The Real News Network that tell of all these outrages makes them sometimes think that all they can do in reaction is to crawl into a hole and blow their brains out. He promised that The Real News Network would try do more stories along the lines “So here’s what you can do about the situation.”
As part of this year’s Global Days of Service programming, the University welcomed Dr. Donald Berwick, former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as the guest speaker for the third-annual Hubie Jones Lecture in Urban Health.
Dr. Berwick is the co-founder, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and has consistently been named one of the top influential healthcare leaders in the country. In his lecture, Dr. Berwick explores the urgency — and possibility — of changing healthcare in America to achieve better care, better health and lower cost through improvement.
The Hubie Jones Lecture in Urban Health is an annual symposium addressing vexing health issues distinct to the urban context, featuring prominent national and international leaders toiling at the intersection of health and social justice.
I defy you to watch the video below – Don starts talking a little past 11 minutes into the video – and not come away thinking that you want this man to be your Governor, and no other candidate comes close. If you live in Massachusetts, you can actually make this happen by voting in the Democratic primary on September 9. That’s next Tuesday.
If you fail my challenge, please spread the word about this video.
