INET in the News

“One of the main reasons Italy’s economy is in such dire straits is its strict adherence to the EMU’s macroeconomic rule book — in particular the rules on fiscal austerity and structural reforms — as Dutch economist Servaas Storm painstakingly details in his article ‘Italy: How to Ruin a Country in Three Decades’” — Nick Corbishley, Naked Capitalism

“The gap between the “technology haves and have nots” in the corporate world is widening. A recent study also found that this gap is widening between rich countries and poor countries. When few companies have access to 3D printers, robots, or cutting-edge AI, there are fewer actors to leverage such technologies to the point at which productivity will increase across the board.” — Wim Naudé, The Conversation

“INET has supported a lot of brilliant academic work in areas such as Imperfect Knowledge Economics, financial regulation, human development, and environmental economics. Such research has helped to discredit the ideas – such as “perfect” competition, “efficient” markets, and “rational” expectations – that formed the ideological foundations for laissez-faire microeconomics, monetarist central banking, and irrational pre-Keynesian fiscal policy, especially in Europe. As such, it has done as much as INET’s other work – including policy research, academic community-building, and deepening collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and other official institutions – to end market fundamentalism’s intellectual monopoly.” — Anatole Kaletsky, Project Syndicate

“Best of Mankiw: Errors and Tangles in the World’s Best-Selling Economics Textbooks Peter Bofinger, former member of the German Council of Economic Experts [Naked Capitalism January 4, 2021] Mankiw has been lambasted a number of times by Adbusters, the Canadian group which originated the call for mass protests that became Occupy Wall Street. Also see Toxic Textbooks: “Mankiw’s textbook seems an ideal place to look for clues as to how both the economics profession and the public which it educates became so ignorant, misinformed and unobservant of how economies work in the real world.” The problem with the leadership of the Democratic Party at the state and national levels is not the caricature of maliciousness that the Trumpists believe, and which the Republicans have used to “feed red meat to their base,” but merely that the leadership has been taught, and believes and swills, the snake oil Mankiw peddles. Below, just a small sample of Bofinger’s detailed take-down of Mankiw.” — NB Books Community, Daily Kos

“To get into the mood for their [Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan] ideas, you can listen to the authors talk about them to my colleague Stephanie Flanders on the Stephanomics podcast, or this podcast from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, or this episode of The Sound of Economics podcast from the Bruegel Institute.” — John Authers, Bloomberg

“The landscape of EM has consolidated into a few corporate conglomerates, which are oligarchies with iron grips on contracts through noncompetitive or illegal collusions with large hospital systems in the form of kickbacks. (Institute for New Economic Thinking. March 15, 2020; https://bit.ly/34fLeMD.) This has effectively castrated any hope for independent practices to thrive and injected many wrongful consequences into EM.” — Rizvi, Saba MD, Emergency Medical News

“But to my surprise, The Atlantic article explained that MIT economist Peter Temin, in his book “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” not only delved into the contributing factors to poverty and economic inequality, he offered systemic solutions. This approach made the piece a must-read for me because at Gainesville for All, we’re all about finding systemic solutions to problems linked to race and poverty. Temin offered five proposals he believes can help tip the scales favorably for those stuck in the lower class.”— James F. Lawrence, Gainsville Sun

“When Texas and nine other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google last week, the complaint identified many of the same conflicts of interest as Ms. Srinivasan’s paper, Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets” in the Stanford Technology Law Review. The lawsuit said Google controlled every part of the digital advertising pipeline and used it to give priority to its own services, acting as “pitcher, batter and umpire, all at the same time.” … “Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant professor at the University of Utah’s economics department, wrote on Twitter that Ms. Srinivasan’s articles on Google and Facebook had a greater influence on the recently filed antitrust cases than all the other research about those companies or tech in general by traditional economists focused on competition policy.” — Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times

“That starts to take tech regulation to a place that’s more similar to financial regulation, which is where it should be. On that note, check out this very interesting INET paper by Dina Srinivasan, which looks at how Google monopolises advertising markets in ways that would be prohibited in other electronic trading markets.” — Rana Foroohar, Financial Times

Joseph Bosco former China country director in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Jack Gao, Program Economist at INET appeared on Arirang News to discuss whether the U.S.-China rivalry will improve under a Biden administration.

Three American researchers, crossing the figures for growth and mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic from many countries, conclude that containment is effective, provided it is accompanied by strong public subsidies.

“But some progressives are worried that “Biden is working backwards from identity,” as one longtime political observer put it, designing a cabinet stocked with diversity but less focused on making the changes that many progressives see as long overdue, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. “I applaud the formidable progress in the diversity of cabinet and key administration appointments. It is long overdue for America,” said Robert Johnson, the president of the Soros-backed Institute for New Economic Thinking. “But it is not a substitute for taking on monied power interests to produce reform leading to broad-based prosperity. If identity politics is used as a mask to avoid that enormous challenge, it will be very dangerous for the already polarized politics of the USA.” — Michael Hirsh, Foreign Policy

“Political scientist Thomas Ferguson, an authoritative scholar on money and electoral politics, has a valuable and established political science theory called “the investment theory of politics.” He demonstrates that the U.S. is essentially controlled by coalitions of investors who come together around some mutual interest. Thus, “to participate in the political arena, you must have enough resources and private power to become part of such a coalition…. McGuire and Delahunt advance the thesis by showing it is actually worse than what others have found. Their study reveals and confirms that the top wealthiest 10 percent ultimately always win on policy — effectively showing that anyone else’s opinion outside of the top 10 percent rarely matters.” — Rajko Kolundzic, Truthout

Private equity’s stake in health care increased rapidly in recent years, reaching a record of 855 deals valued at $100 billion in 2018, according to a March 2020 study published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a nonprofit think tank based in New York City. — Janet Colwell, ACP Hospitalist

“’human beings must be driven by x’…. well this is a myth about human beings and it’s not really the way we work, but the religion of capitalism insists that it is true. This is a sacred idea that competition is ultimately for the best of society, that the market will decide what is best, not governments or we the people. I think one of the things that Eugene McCarraher who wrote this book, “The Enchantments of Mammon” susses out in a very nuanced way, is how our country is built on these sort of opposing ideas. On the one hand we have this idea of competition and then we have another religious idea about brotherhood which is also baked into the sacred text of our nation. These two things are kind of ill-fitting and trying to make them work together is something we’re still struggling with right now.” — Lynn Parramore