Danish people have the highest quality of life in the world, and Forbes has rated Denmark as the best economy for business in the entire world – for the third time in five years.
Norway’s success as a nation is already well known without requiring an evolutionary lens. Along with other Nordic countries, it scores high on any list of economic and life quality indicators.
Evropa prožívá obrovský paradox: Je zároveň kontinentem s nejvyšším soukromým majetkem na světě a zároveň kontinentem, který má největší problémy s vyřešením krize svého veřejného dluhu.
Horních deset procent nejbohatších, kteří vlastní 60 % veškerého majetku, vlastní zároveň z velké části i státní dluhy v podobě dluhopisů. V podstatě jsou nejbohatší domácnosti dost bohaté na to, aby si koupily veškerý veřejný majetek v Evropě.
Ve své aktuální knize „Economism: Bad Economics and Rise of Inequality“ přisoudil James Kwak primitivní víru v trhy jako v moudré stroje, které produkují společensky optimální výsledky, konzervativním think tankům, které platí korporace a bohatí. Určitě má částečně pravdu, ale takováto propaganda pocházela z intelektuálního modelu, který byl skryt v centru ekonomie dlouhou dobu – a pořád tam je jako vysoce ceněný přístup.
Když se v roce 2015 ujala moci středolevá socialistická vláda, oponenti varovali, že její opatření vyvolají finanční katastrofu. Ta totiž mimo jiné zahrnovala návrat ke čtyřem státním svátkům, 35-hodinový pracovní týden pro vládní zaměstnance a snížení daně pro jídla v restauracích na 13 % z 23 %.
Amazon, Google, Lukoil. Všichni důležití světoví hráči – od Spojených států po Rusko – platili ze svých evropských zisků od jednoho do tří procent daní. Jestli se název nějaké velké firmy v dokumentech z Lucemburska neobjevuje, jsou tam různé dceřiné společnosti. Oficiální daň z příjmů právnických osob je v Lucembursku 29 procent. Tvrdí, že mají vysoké daně, a přitom pokoutně – jedno procento.
Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to further pillage and immolate the local populace). That’s what you should think of when you consider the mind-boggling hoards of wealth that the very rich have amassed in America over the last forty years.
The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models, which have played such an important role in modern discussions of macroeconomics, in my judgment fail to serve the functions
which a well-designed macroeconomic model should perform. The most important challenge facing any macro-model is to provide insights into the deep downturns that have occurred repeatedly and what should be done in response.
The implication is clear. People at or below the median income saw their incomes rise by 1 percent or less every year during that period. That isn’t nothing, but it’s hardly great. At the very bottom, some people have seen incomes fall pre-tax; while most poor households get government assistance to help with that, programs like food stamps or the earned income tax credit fail to reach about 20 to 25 percent of the people they’re meant to help.
Celá řada problémů, jež se nám dnes jeví jako nerozhodnutelné a jen s obtížemi řešitelné, se podle mého mínění ukáže ve zcela jiném světle, pokud změníme samotný pohled na peníze. „Změníme-li podstatu“ peněz, což v našem případě znamená jen tolik, že je začneme jinak chápat (jako jazyk), zbavíme se některých problémů téměř jako čarovným mávnutím proutkem.
“The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.”
Awareness of history must enter economic theory by showing that concepts such as cost, profit, wage, rent, and even commercial rationality have anthropological dimensions specific to social systems. The humility to accept that economic propositions cannot be universal would save us from self-defeating arrogance.
Are you uber-oligarchs capable of noticing when greed may tip way beyond mere economic stupidity and immorality into life threatening self-destruction? When – as happened many times in the past – insatiable top-down class war could wind up taking you on a tumbrel ride toward guillotines.
“The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than it is in theory.” This difference between theory and practice is driven by complex interactions not only between rules but between multiple players with competing incentives.
Wall Street and wealthy Americans are in fact the biggest winners from policies like quantitative easing, while Main Street Americans have seen little improvement in their economic lives. A more broadly based fiscal policy response might have engendered a recovery less skewed toward the haves, rather than the have nots. End result? Inequality is getting worse, people are getting a lot angrier and we get political phenomena like Donald Trump.
At the same time, there is no shortage of money waiting to be put to productive use. Just a few years ago, Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, talked about a global savings glut. And yet investment projects with high social returns were being starved of funds.
Piketty said that while Germany never repaid its massive debts after both world wars, it has continuously demanded that other nations, especially Greece, pay theirs.
When any one person, or firm, or state saves, that’s individually rational. But if we all do it at once, that’s collectively suicidal. Someone has to spend for there to be an income generated from which someone else can save.
The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture of European banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
Perfect markets concentrate wealth. It’s their nature. But at some point, market-generated wealth concentration strangles those very markets (compared to markets with broader distributions of wealth). If a handful of people have all the wealth, how many iPhones will Apple sell?
The central idea that the book follows is that human cultural learning gives rise to a system of cumulative cultural evolution that, over generations, gradually produces increasingly complex tools, technologies, bodies of know-how, communication systems and institutions. This is effectively a second system of inheritance that has been interacting with our genetic inheritance for more than a million years.
According to their research, the vast majority of Americans lack basic levels of financial literacy. For example, a survey of Americans over the age of 50 that asked three basic questions about compound interest, inflation, and risk diversification found that only a third answered all three questions correctly.
Despite the practical failures of free-market economics, too many mainstream economists have continued to embrace simplistic ideas about how the economy works. Such ideas are often rooted more in ideology than in evidence.
Capitalism requires inequality of wealth, runs this right-of-centre argument, to stimulate risk-taking and effort; governments trying to stem it with taxes on wealth, capital, inheritance and property kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Conservatives confidently predicted economic disaster after Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike. What happened instead was a boom that surpassed the Reagan expansion in every dimension: G.D.P., jobs, wages and family incomes.
The causes and consequences of rising inequality have stirred a lively debate on appropriate policy responses. This column reviews how governments have successfully used fiscal policy to address distributive concerns.
In addition to having municipalities receive lower returns on their loans around the time of the financial crisis, it appears that US home buyers may have been scammed out of nearly a half-trillion Dollars on overpriced mortgage payments:
First, when debt rises faster than economic output (as it has been doing in recent years), higher government debt implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future. Second, debt must be rolled over at regular intervals.
In his article Economics of Shortage (1980), János Kornai argued that the chronic shortages seen throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1970s (and which continued during the 1980s) were not the consequences of planners‘ errors or the wrong prices, but rather systemic flaws.
Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty.
The book of nature is like the Bible: everyone reads into it what they like, from tolerance to intolerance and from altruism to greed. But it’s good to realise that, if biologists never stop talking about competition, this doesn’t mean that they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn’t mean that genes actually are.
The consequences in Kansas, after all, are a result of fulfilling the great Laffer Curve dream that has Republican presidential hopefuls such as Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Chris Christie all salivating: dramatic tax cuts, concentrated among those at the top, coupled with the promise that such action will, through trickle-down voodoo, increase tax revenue and boost economic growth. … Despite faith-based forecasts promising bountiful revenue, tax receipts have come in, again and again, hundreds of million dollars below projections.