Economics Archives - Page 5 of 20

“Embeddedness” in the Federal Reserve Comic Books

An Inquiry into the Ideological Constructions of the Social

July 23, 2019 • by John P. Antonacci

Three such comic books can currently be accessed on the Federal Reserve’s website. The Fed’s website offers us a short introduction to the series, claiming that “The New York Fed’s Educational Comic Book series teaches students about basic economic principles and the Federal Reserve’s role in the financial system.” Entitled The Story ...

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The Unemployment Rate Is Not a Fact

Our country’s most trusted economic metric is only a political artifact.

July 5, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

The year was 1875 and Carrol Wright was upset. The mustached state senator from Massachusetts thought that American workers had a problem. Just not the problem that the workers thought they had. Following the financial Panic of 1873 and nosediving wages, Americans were launching wildcat strikes, torching railroad stations, and fighting ...

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Networking and Human Nature

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism

June 22, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism...

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On Capitalism

The worst there Is, except for all the others

May 30, 2019 • by Daniel Rose

Winston Churchill’s famous comment on democracy as a political system applies equally to free enterprise capitalism as an economic system. No other economic form provides the incentives to economic innovation and creativity, relates the desires of the consumer to the efforts of the producer, encourages the voluntary savings and investment ...

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Speculating on Chaos in Financialized Capitalism

Speculations, Spectacles, Spectres

May 30, 2019 • by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Across the channel, during the upheaval caused by the gilets jaunes movement, media and government have condemned protestors’ actions for the continuing chaos they have brought upon France’s city centers. Back in autumn, some weeks before the eruption of the gilet jaunes protests, President Macron used his Armistice Speech to focus on the ...

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Debt: A Lever of Dispossession

Case Studies in Resistance

May 22, 2019 • by Iolanda Fresnillo

“Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa” Thomas Sankara “In modern times, debt has become a key means of capital accumulation. Ubiquitous, it has taken on a new function, as the most general category through which exploitation is organized” Silvia Federici The 2008 crisis burst and debt rang our doorbell. Spain, together with ...

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“Will Modi Return?”

The Inevitable Question from the Indian Elections 2019

May 16, 2019 • by Sarbani Sharma

For at least a few months now, most Indians in their workplaces, homes and within their communities have been unwittingly discussing the inescapable context of the 2019 General Elections. At the time I write this article, the 17th General Elections are underway in India and six out of the seven ...

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The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

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A Complex Balance

The Boeing 737 MAX Crashes

May 3, 2019 • by Richard McGahey

The recent tragic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX airliners have raised concerns that commercial aircraft are too complicated to operate due to the increasingly complex technologies involved. Notably, Donald Trump tweeted “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT.” Others disagree, saying technology ...

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...

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Artist-as-debtor, Debt-as-Creator

The unseen debt sustaining the art market

April 15, 2019 • by Noah Fischer

This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Is there a better place to glimpse the logic of capitalism than at art fairs, those ultra luxury trade shows ...

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Forty Percent of NYC’s Working Families Don’t Make Enough to Afford Basics

A new study determines the amount of income necessary to meet the basic needs of working families without public or private assistance

March 31, 2019 • by Sheena Wright and Merble Reagon

With the cost of living rising at nearly three times the rate of wages, 2.5 million working-age New Yorkers are struggling to provide food, housing, and other basic necessities for their families. United Way of New York City, The Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement, City Harvest, and The ...