David Bly

Zillionaire @NickHanauer exposes the 7 decisions that broke the American economy: 1. The minimum wage was frozen. 2. The overtime threshold was left to stagnate. 3. Antitrust enforcement was abandoned. 4. Organized labor was systematically dismantled. 5. The tax code was rewritten to favor capital over labor. 6. Healthcare was turned into a machine for extracting profits. 7. Maximizing shareholder returns became the overriding purpose of corporations. Hanauer argues there is a better way: "The economics underlying these seven decisions doesn’t hold up. Rational self-interested actors, efficient markets, equilibrium — none of it describes how real economies behave. Examine how economies actually work using twenty-first century science instead of 1970s ideology and the framework comes apart in your hands. It has one outcome available to it, which is more inequality. So it has to be replaced. Not patched. Replaced. That’s the work I’ve been doing with Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker. We call it Market Humanism, and it builds the best research across economics, behavioral science, and complexity theory into a framework for an economy that works for everyone." Read it at marketsbuiltforhumans.com.

“This distinctive feature of this system – as Dean Baker shows – is the protectionism of the capital owners and the maintenance of upward redistribution towards them, at the expense of wage growth of the labor force – this is why neoliberalism needs to capture the state.” Archive pick: evonomics.com/look-behind-ne…

Sam Bowles argues that extreme wealth inequality makes economies less productive: It allows the wealthy to concentrate political power, protect their privileges, and shape economic rules in their favor—at the expense of innovation, opportunity, and productivity. Read "Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy": evonomics.com/eight-reasons-…

Conventional economic theory predicts that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. But decades of evidence challenge that prediction. Why? Economist @keds_economist explains how employer market power—known as monopsony—helps explain why higher minimum wages don't necessarily lead to job losses. Full podcast in comments.

Economist @MazzucatoM: "The problem is that companies have become increasingly short-termist, spending more of their profits on financial practices that boost stock prices rather than making long-term investments in areas like research and development and human capital." Read more: evonomics.com/economist-debu…

"The problem is not that there are a lot of evil people. Most people play by the rules and are just trying to make a good living. But, inevitably, the competitive pressures for businessmen to practice deception and manipulation in free markets lead us to buy, and to pay too much for, products that we do not need; to work at jobs that give us little sense of purpose; and to wonder why our lives have gone amiss." @RobertJShiller and @GeorgeAkerlof Archive pick: evonomics.com/nobel-prize-ec…

One of the biggest problems with modern economics is that it began confusing mathematical elegance with scientific truth. To make economic models mathematically tractable, economists have to simplify the real world—often dramatically. That’s not necessarily ideological. It’s what you have to do if you want to solve the equations. But eventually the math became the master rather than the servant. Assumptions about perfectly rational people, equilibrium, efficient markets, and simplified human behavior persisted partly because adding more of the messy reality of how humans and economies actually work makes the equations much harder to solve. And there was another problem: the mathematics gave economics enormous prestige. It allowed economists to imagine their discipline as something resembling classical physics—a precise science governed by elegant mathematical laws. Admitting that economies are complex, evolving systems populated by social, emotional, cooperative, competitive, power-seeking human beings would mean giving up some of that certainty. Heaven forbid! Read more: evonomics.com/failed-economi… @David_S_Wilson @davidmcw @yanisvaroufakis @rorysutherland