Daily Archives: February 27, 2014

Public Debt, Public Assets and Public Capacity

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Dan Kervick | 4 comments

Everybody is very excited about Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, whose English translation is due out on March 10th from Harvard University Press. The book studies long term trends in the accumulation and concentration of wealth, and in the evolution of inequality. The argument of the book is intensely data-driven, and has been billed as a game changer since it first appeared in French earlier this year.

Matt Yglesias reproduces a chart from the book, and calls it “the chart the debt alarmists don’t want you to see”. However, if I were a debt alarmist, I don’t think I would be very much moved by the chart, and wouldn’t worry so much about others seeing it. Let me explain. Here is Piketty’s original version of the chart, and here is Yglesias’s colorized reproduction :

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Posted in Dan Kervick

The Triumphant Return of NEP’s Podcast

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Stephanie Kelton | 5 comments

By Stephanie Kelton

It’s been a long time, but I finally carved out enough time to record a new podcast. Although they’re my colleagues, Bill Black, Randy Wray and I see surprisingly little of one another these days. I did manage to catch up with Bill in Minneapolis last week, where I happened to be giving a talk (more on that in the coming days), but for the most part we’re all just trying to keep up with requests, which is a good problem to have when you think about it.

It was nice to slow down and talk with Randy this afternoon. We promised one another we’d do it more often. Anyway, here is today’s podcast. We hope you enjoy it.

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Revising Adam Smith

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Devin Smith | 6 comments

By J.D. Alt

The Ebook DIAGRAMS & DOLLARS (in top 10 best-sellers on Amazon/ category money & monetary policy!) paints an optimistic picture of what “Sovereign Spending” could achieve for our collective benefit. The video made from it (approaching 3,000 views on YouTube—thank you Haiku Charlatan!) ends with cheering calisthenics around the final diagram of our national prosperity. Unfortunately, the “real world” of our Congressional leaders and media spin-machine is painting a very different picture—a dire vision of out-of-control government spending and national insolvency. Understanding why that is, and what we can do about it, is the real challenge we have before us.

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Posted in J. D. Alt

Tagged adam smith, sovereign currency

Degrees of Responsibility for Climate Catastrophe

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Devin Smith | 16 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The climate crisis is an event with such profound personal and broadly social moral implications that many shy away from discussing the crisis itself let alone its ethical aspects. Via our society’s use of fossil fuels we are, if our combustion of these fuels remains unchecked and in addition we further destroy the carbon fixing capacity of natural systems, destroying almost all wealth, the likelihood of their being future civilizations, and even the possibility for existence for future generations. To continue ignoring climate change and effective climate action is definitely an après moi le deluge stance, an expression of callousness and self-absorption unsupportable by moral justification. Morality and ethics is here not an exotic preoccupation of a select group but a basic reality-check: does what we are doing make sense and promote the general ends to which these activities are devoted? How do we assess our own agency and role and those of others, in events that are occurring around us and will with very high likelihood exacerbate in the future?

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