debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The doctrine of imposing present pain for future benefit has a long history – stretching all the way back to Adam Smith and his praise of “parsimony.” It is particularly vociferous in “hard times.” In 1930, US President Herbert Hoover was advised by his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, [...]
Out of all the visits to my homeland during the crisis, the trip at the end of summer of 2011 was the one that gave me the sense that Greece’s social fabric was close to tearing point. In June of that summer, the protests of thousands of Greeks outside Parliament were met with extensive repression [...]
Europe is in deep crisis and people are losing more and more trust. According to the EU-Eurobarometer, distrust runs at 53% in Italy, 56% in France, 59% in Germany, 69% in the UK and 72% in Spain. As the EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens, The Guardian recently asked: “does it [...]
At the end of next June the European Council summit will debate a proposal to reform the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) based on the roadmap approved last December. The debate and decisions adopted will discuss the worst crisis faced by the EU since its birth in 1957. The nature of this crisis is, at [...]
Some claims made for economic austerity policies are so prima facie absurd that no one would believe them, making it a waste of time to point out the absurdity. Or so I thought, and wrong I was. The suggestion that a near-miracle recovery occurred in Latvia, and that this extraordinary reversal from bust to boom [...]
Austerity is the curse of our time. Governments cut spending, raise taxes, reduce employment and lower wages in the hope of better times. The consequences are dire. 26 million people are unemployed in the European Union. Youth unemployment is 6 million, in Spain and Greece more than 50 percent. [1] A whole generation is desperately [...]
Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. Most had forecast growth of at least 3 percent (on an annualized basis) in the first quarter. But we learned this morning (in the Commerce Department’s report) it grew only 2.5 percent. That’s better than the 2 percent growth last year and the slowdown at the end of the [...]
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have defended their work of the public debt-growth against their critics in the New York Times. It is not convincing. They repeat their claim that they always insisted that they were talking about correlation, even if less careful or interested parties made strong claims about causation. But this is belied [...]
The Real News Network has a very interesting interview with Professor Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, one of the academics who debunked the research by Reinhart and Rogoff claiming that once countries pass a 90% debt to GDP ratio growth drops off significantly. If you haven’t yet heard the main arguments against [...]
If you want to give a really, really brief and basic intro to empirical social scientific research, for an alert school-kid or to give an elderly relative with a limited attention span an idea what you do all day, you might, simplifying heroically, say something like this. There are two basic ways to analyse regularities [...]
A number of commentators have been discussing the use made of the now debunked Reinhart-Rogoff findings by EU economics commissioner Olli Rehn. (Wolfgang Munchau is in good form.) He repeatedly referred in speeches and publications to a 90% rule that, we now know if we didn’t already, is humbug. It is worth looking a little [...]
Euro Area economies remain stuck in recession but in the corridors of the European Council, the austerians in charge are congratulating themselves, pretending that their strategies are starting to deliver good results. Falling external deficits: Not a sign of success but of an economy in meltdown A first fairy tale is to claim that wage [...]
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