Tag Archives: morality

Mankiw Morality in a Mash Up with Mankiw Myths

By William K. Black
May 8, 2016     Kansas City, MO

N. Gregory Mankiw writes leading textbooks in economics that present neoliberal economic nostrums as economic “principles.” Mankiw wrote a column in the New York Times entitled “The Economy Is Rigged, and Other Presidential Campaign Myths.” The title reflects the central nature of his attack on Bernie Sanders explaining how the economy is rigged in favor of elite bank fraudsters.  This first column in a series responds to Mankiw’s myths about the rigged financial system.  The next column deals with Mankiw’s myths about the trade deals.

Mankiw misfires immediately because he does not even attempt to refute Bernie’s explanations of how finance is rigged.  Instead, Mankiw conflates income inequality and the rigging of finance.

Continue reading

Money and Morality

By Brian Werner

Notions of money, debt and morality have a long history together (see Graeber and Atwood).  Money and the desire for it is usually connected with greed and immorality like in the often paraphrased “The love of money is the root of all evil” from the New Testament book 1 Timothy.  But what if a better understanding of what money is can help our country to be moral?

Continue reading

A Response to J.D. Alt: Mobilization and Money

By Glenn Stehle

Analyzing the nexus of war, economics, and society is a fascinating undertaking.  War is the deployment of the state’s instruments of violence — the military and the police.  So instead of the nexus of war, economics, and society, we could just as easily speak of the nexus of state violence, economics and society.  And since Alt chose to make his article a morality tale, I would like to continue in that vein.

The two moral prerogatives which Alt articulates are 1) utilitarianism and 2) equality. We see this, for instance, when he notes that Continue reading