For more than a century, political economists have sought to understand the nature of capital. The prevailing wisdom is that there must be something ‘real’ – some productive capacity – that underpins capitalized values. This thinking, I argue, is a mistake. Building on Jonathan Nitzan...

Economists are not known for their literary imaginations. Flip through any economics textbook and you’ll find a barrage of terms like the ‘Philips curve’ and the ‘Fisher effect’. The jargon is simple enough — empirical relations are usually named after the person who discovered them....

Think of this question as a sword — a sharp piece of steel that cuts through bullshit. In this post, we’ll use it to slice through business-press bullshit about the stock market. You know the stuff — the ubiquitous puff pieces that gush about rising stock prices, as though they benefit...

Have you ever wondered what it takes to become a billionaire? Do you need rare genius? Exceptional acumen? Miraculous foresight? An uncompromising work ethic? On all four counts, the answer is no. It turns out that to become a billionaire, what you really need is the right social setting. You...

There’s an old joke that economics is too important to be left to economists. In the same vein, I think rich people are too important to be left to the self-help industry. Yes, the popular appeal of you-can-get-rich-too books is obvious. But what’s not obvious is why so few social scientists...

The rich get richer. It’s a phrase that packs a lot of punch. It’s potent rhetoric, yet surprisingly accurate at describing how rising inequality plays out. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the rich getting richer. We just happen to live in an age of growing corporate despotism....

FROM THE ARTICLE. *** In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official...

От редакции: среди всего набора макроэкономических тем, текущие показатели инфляции — одна из самых популярных и часто обсуждаемых. Аргументы сторонников...

It turns out that like the rest of us, billionaires experience wealth inequality. (Individuals who top the Forbes billionaire list are far richer than those at the bottom of the list.) Interestingly, this billionaire wealth concentration fluctuates over time … in tight correlation with the...