#neoliberal-critique

#neoliberal-critique

In her latest book, Indignity, Ypi blends archival material with a fictionalized account of her grandmother's childhood in Thessaloniki and her arrival in Albania, exploring themes of memory and dignity.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the unprecedented step of designating a U.S. firm-Anthropic-as a supply chain risk. Anthropic's crime? It refused to violate industry-wide protocols against using AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Hegseth's designation, which has until now been reserved for foreign firms, bars U.S. military contractors from doing business with the company.

A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.

This is not an argument against continuing to line things up just so, of course. It just means that the very orderly person will over time become a very familiar face to the people at The Container Store, to the point where they might remark to each other during their breaks about having seen him, again, purchasing more of those stackable, breakable containers that he's always getting.

Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein has accepted Professor Lawrence H. Summers' resignation from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Professor Summers has announced that he will retire from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until that time.

Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.

My reforms changed the welfare system to make work pay and brought workless households to an all-time low. But because of the post-Covid collapse in vetting and rise of health-related welfare claims, millions of workers could take home more from welfare than wages after tax. This is an outrageous state of affairs. The system must stop writing off thousands every day and incentives to work need to be restored to end this ruinous waste of human potential.

The readings in my last series led me to see the genuine hatred conservatives have for what they call variously liberal hegemony, liberal ideology, left-wing ideology, and other names. David Brooks, newly ensconced at Yale and The Atlantic, is just sure it was liberals who caused Trump's wins, with their snotty "knowledge", and "refined tastes". I mocked this nonsense, but apparently Brooks was serious about the super bad feelings his people have about such things.

Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality - if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism?

The president's rallying cry was aspirational for the same reason that his economic agenda is flailing: He and his party have no abiding interest in advancing an economic program that would actually benefit working-class Americans. And Trump, being Trump, has refrained from devoting any serious thought or attention to deep and lasting economic reforms. Instead, he's pushed a series of gimmicky policy responses that amount to opportunistic photo-ops at best, and cynical afterthoughts at worst.

By launching a legal assault on the Fed, Mr Trump is trying to shift blame for borrowing costs. Yet despite controlling the presidency, Senate and the House, Republicans have passed little beyond a large tax-cutting bill that benefits the rich. They have not legislated on housing supply, childcare, healthcare costs or wages. Indeed most of their actions are worsening affordability, notably deferring action even though millions face a sharp rise in their health insurance bills.

This week the IMF released an update to its World Economic Outlook, titled Global Economy: Steady amid Divergent Forces and, seriously, in what fricking world are they living? It was yet another example of international groups, governments and parts of the media sane-washing the utter crisis we all exist in because Donald Trump is an egomaniacal bully with the impulses of a spoiled toddler.

"It's the least conservative government of my lifetime." Wolfers, who the IMF once named one of 25 young economists in the world "shaping the way we think about the global economy," said that Trump's undermining of federal institutions' independence and propensity to insert himself in private sector decisions is reorienting the economy away from a productive and predictable path. The result, Wolfers warned, could be a generation of missed opportunities and lost growth.