Economy Archives - Page 3 of 18

Economy

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

How the business of cobbling together a living became a new form of unpaid labor

October 17, 2024 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

I know someone, a nurse, who doesn’t have health insurance. His employer, a staffing agency, bounces him from assignment to assignment—sometimes with only a day’s notice. Engaged in skilled care work that is profoundly dependent on the ability to maintain human relationships, he often finds himself treated more like a ...

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

Economy

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

A new survey sheds light on the working conditions of New York City’s “independent contractors”

October 16, 2024 • by Lina Moe

Ask any organizer and you’ll hear how hard it is to reach gig workers. These workers typically lack a physical place of work or regular schedule (though many work all the time), and their work is poorly measured in Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. The gig workers ...

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

Interviews

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

A conversation with Ronnie Grinberg about her book Write Like a Man

October 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Ronnie Grinberg

In this biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent post war writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College....

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

Capitalism

Social Capitalism

Synthesizing Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter

September 17, 2024 • by Anna Pick and Mark Setterfield

Feathers were ruffled at Davos this year when, during a panel on “How to Trust Economics,” a speaker went rogue, accusing economists of being a “tribal clique” who only quote each other and have “blind faith” in models, however disconnected from real events they may be. The critique came not ...

Capitalism

Biden’s Green Protectionism

Behind rhetoric about jobs and green energy is a bid for a $650 billion industry

September 16, 2024 • by Yannis Bougiatiotis

Domestic economic commentators tend to describe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the rise of American green industrial policy along three lines. Lawrence Summers, former United States secretary of the treasury under Clinton, has criticized Biden’s protectionist policies as a “manufacturing-centered economic nationalism.” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has supported Biden’s ...

Economy

Is Finance a “Parasite”?

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock

June 25, 2024 • by Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher and Anna Pick

Democratizing the state means deepening public control over the Fed and other macroeconomic institutions, to run finance as a public utility....

Economy

Columbia University’s “Crisis”

A political economy sketch map

May 3, 2024 • by Adam Tooze

Questions of political economy are at the heart of the Columbia University protests....

Finance

Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes

A review of Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

May 1, 2024 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

Electronic platforms can also be thought of as a distinctive type of “terrain” that, like land, can define specific types of revenue and power for those who control them. ...

Corporations

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

From government oversight to “financial literacy”

April 30, 2024 • by Basak Kus

Consumer protection started to be seen as a responsibility that individuals, deemed rational and capable, were expected to shoulder themselves, assuming they were provided adequate information about the terms of exchange. ...

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

Economy

From “Boring” to “Roaring” Banking

A review of Gerald Epstein’s Busting the Banker’s Club

April 29, 2024 • by Anna Pick

Harder to measure, but no less crucial, is Epstein’s identification of the intellectual “capture” of both the academy and policymaking institutions—their infiltration by financial interests and the economic paradigms that prop them up. ...

Economy

Home Ownership and the History of Mortgages

Episode 402

November 28, 2023 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

In this episode of Past Present, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss Americans’ attachment to the thirty-year mortgage...

Home Ownership and the History of Mortgages

Activism

Radical Care and the Making of a New World

What is a truly caring society?

November 28, 2023 • by Premilla Nadasen

Few people would disagree with an aspirational goal of a truly caring society—but what is a truly caring society? And what is the role of the state in a radical future? What kinds of reforms move us closer to a goal of a caring world, rather than setting us back? ...