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...

Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why...

Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why...

This paper uses word frequency to track the rise and potential peak of capitalist ideology. Using a sample of mainstream economics textbooks as my corpus of capitalist thinking, I isolate the jargon of these books and then track its frequency over time in the Google English corpus. I also...

As much of the world grapples with post-Covid price gouging, it seems like a good time to revisit our understanding of inflation. In this post, I’m going to test Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘stagflation thesis’. The idea is that ‘stagflation’ — economic stagnation...

Whenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation. It’s so intuitive that it must be true. Or is it? As the Reverend Brooke observes, it...

I’ve been writing about inflation for the better part of three months. It’s been exhausting. Most of my time has been spent debunking misconceptions promoted by mainstream economists. Fortunately, I’m ready to move on. What’s interesting about inflation is not the fact that prices rise....

Can the oil industry afford to clean up its mess? If by ‘mess’ we mean fossil-fuel-induced climate change, the answer is almost certainly ‘no’. But what if we look at a more limited cleanup scenario, restricted to the remediation of conventional oil and gas wells? Even then, it seems...

When I read about monetary policy, I have a rule of thumb. Every time I see the phrase interest rate, I replace it with the term wage rate. Then I ask myself whether the discussion still makes sense. Often, it does not. The reason I make this substitution is that in conceptual terms, the...

For the last few months, I’ve been studying the distributional effects of interest-rate hikes. There’s been no shortage of surprising results. In this post, I’ll discuss an effect that is surprising because it’s underwhelming. Many economist claim that when interest rates rise,...