Economics Archives - Page 12 of 20

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Speculation and Counter-speculation

From value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption

October 12, 2017 • by Joshua Simon

Finance is speculation on debt. In the past decades, finance has replaced production, while debt has replaced waged labor as the main generator of profit in the contemporary economy. Under the reign of production, labor-time aimed to semiotize value. In other words, each terrain of human activity was assigned a ...

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GOP Tax Plan Fails to Reform Regressive Retirement Tax Breaks

September Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

October 6, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

It's no surprise that older workers have little retirement savings ($12,000 on average). This is despite the $180 billion in tax breaks a year to encourage people to save for retirement. That's because these tax breaks are highly regressive, giving 66% of the benefits to those in the top 20% of the income ...

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Global Histories of Capitalism Conference

A Conference at The New School

October 2, 2017 • by Aaron Jakes, Meghna Chaudhuri, Matthew Shutzer and Emma Park

Our conference aims to address the one-sidedness of the recent European and U.S. historiographic turn to the “history of capitalism” by providing one of the first venues to direct comparative investigations of emergent scholarship on the history of capital in the non-west. Our conference assembles a range of scholars from ...

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Confronting Financialization Demands a Radical Cultural Politics

An excerpt from Cultures of Financialization

September 18, 2017 • by Max Haiven

Rather than (or in addition to) castigating finance as purely the realm of capitalist excess, greed, cruelty and extortion, we may also need to see finance, and the broader processes of financialization, as both symptomatic and revelatory of some deeper, more profound and potent truths about our society. Financialization is, ...

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How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

An Excerpt from Laura Briggs’ latest book

September 12, 2017 • by Laura Briggs

The Subprime Trump’s presidency has sometimes been portrayed as a historical earthquake, radically discontinuous from what came before. Who could have predicted that at a time of rising employment rates, white U.S. Americans would vote in economic resentment of the Democratic Party? How could one foresee a hostile takeover of the ...

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

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Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

An excerpt from Rachel Sherman’s new book

September 11, 2017 • by Rachel Sherman

Scott told me he had been self-conscious about his wealth since he was a child. He recalled feeling sensitive to comments classmates and others would make about the size of his family’s house. He said, “I just felt like, ‘Yeah, this is kind of different. And, it’s something to hide.’” ...

Politics

Near-Retirees at All Incomes Are Almost 1/3 Short of Target Retirement Savings

August Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

September 2, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

Low-, middle-, and high-income near retirees are almost one-third short of the savings they need to maintain their standard of living in retirement. ReLab's new report using just-released government data documents that the median level of retirement savings in IRAs and 401(k)-type plans among workers ages 55-64 is $15,000. When workers who do not ...

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One out of Four Older Workers Lack Employer Provided Health Insurance

July Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

August 8, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reported a 3.2% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in July, no change from June. While the low unemployment rate may indicate a healthy labor market for older workers, it doesn't tell us about job quality. Only 76% of older workers obtain health insurance through their ...

One out of Four Older Workers Lack Employer Provided Health Insurance

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Making Russia Great Again

The Facts and Fictions of Russian Nationalism

July 19, 2017 • by Abby Schrader

On Monday, Richard D. Anderson argued that carefully managed conflict with the United States allows Putin to balance the competing demands of kleptocracy and nationalism without giving in to forces on his left or his right. Today, historian Abby Schrader explains that eliminating economic sanctions may be critical to the stability ...

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The Controversy Over Democracy in Chains

A Review Essay

July 18, 2017 • by Andrew Seal

You may be aware that the new book by Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017) has received a lot of notice over the past week or two. Some of this notice has been very positive, but much more has been ...

The Controversy Over Democracy in Chains

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What Older Workers in the Rust Belt Need From Trump

June Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

July 13, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reported a 3.2% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in June, an increase of 0.1 percentage points from May. The low unemployment rate for near retirees is good news. The bad news is that no one can work forever, and our calculations report a ...

What Older Workers in the Rust Belt Need From Trump

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What’s With Japanese Women?

Motherhood and Gender Inequality

June 26, 2017 • by Frances McCall Rosenbluth

Japan ranks 114th out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Equality Index. Fewer than half of working age women have jobs, and many of those are part time positions without benefits. Women working in full time jobs can expect 73% of the hourly wage of their male ...