Israel is actually WORSE than apartheid ever was in South Africa
Posted: 2014/05/02 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/VideoTags: apartheid, Israel, justice, media, occupation, Palestine
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NPR coverage of Ukraine sounds like parody of 50s propaganda
Posted: 2014/05/02 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/VideoMiddle school level silly contradictions and Supreme NATO commander is a certified moron. Ridiculous
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Can the Internet democratise capitalism?
Posted: 2014/05/01 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/Video
Technological fixes to time-honoured problems are all the rage these days. Bitcoin is meant to fix money, social media are seen as an antidote to Rupert Murdoch and assorted tyrants, networked robots are to help countries like Japan deal with demographic declines etc. Perhaps the largest claim is that the Internet has helped (or is about to help) democratise capitalism. Ten years ago that claim struck me as both fascinating and dubious. So, I sat down and wrote an article about it (circa 2004). Its gist: The Internet is a wonderful leveller. But democracy requires a great deal more than mere ‘levelling’. Primarily, it requires political institutions that enable the economically weak to have a decisive say on policy against the interests of the rich and powerful. Ten years later, I am re-visiting this question, under the shadow of a global crisis that made it even harder to convert an…
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The Chosen Ones: Krugman’s Critique of the Critics
Posted: 2014/05/01 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/Video
Krugman is out with a kind-of-sort-of attack on critics of economics. It’s not surprising because Krugman is a very kind-of-sort-of type of guy in many of his opinions. The language of his latest piece, however, is somewhat bizarre. He labels heterodox economists ‘Gentiles’, presumably making orthodox economists, what? God’s chosen people? It’s a metaphor made in light-hearted jest — but it speaks volumes.
Krugman knows that he is dealing with a group that has been marginalised for years. Indeed, there is much documentary evidence that Krugman has been on the front lines marginalising those very people. You can see this, for example, in his exchanges with James Galbraith in the mid-1990s. But recently it seems like the heterodox crowd have been getting a lot right: themes such as income inequality and stagnation are those that the heterodox literature deals with in detail. And the students are waking up…
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Blabber about Virtual Economics (Tenderloin’s Rubbish)
Posted: 2014/05/01 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/VideoTags: computer games, Steam, video games, virtual currency, virtual worlds, Yanis Varoufakis
Yanis Varoufakis, a famous economist from University of Athens known for his analyses of Greece’s debt issue and the euro crisis, once mentioned that “Economic theory has come to a dead end – the last real breakthrough were in the 1960s.” Mr.Varoufakis named governments’s fear of economic experiments in the national scale (who can blame them?) and difficulty of conducting these tests as primary culprits. Yanis was later hired by Valve to consult Steam’s cross-gaming virtual market. (Steam allows you to trade vanity virtual goods between different games). Yanis doesn’t play games, but he is a quant nerd, and he believes that gaming is a great sandbox to test economic theories. While I agree that games can provide good real world simulation, you have to treat each games as their own unique environment, failure to realize this, and anything you learn from the simulation will be a waste in the real world.
Read the entire post here: http://miscountingsheep.com/wordpress/2013/11/blabber-about-virtual-economics/
Punkonomics (@DearBalak) 