Archives for January 25, 2025

Professor J.W. Mason: “Democrats Lost on the Economy. What Voters Felt That the Politicians Missed.”

“Commentators have written off voters’ concerns as mere vibes or the result of misleading media coverage. But a more careful look suggests that there is something to voters’ perception that they are worse-off economically. Although wages have more than kept pace with inflation, especially at the bottom, wages are not the only source of income. The withdrawal of pandemic-era welfare policies has left many people materially worse off than in the first year of the Biden administration, even as their paychecks have grown.”

Full article at Barron’s.

Professor Christian Parenti: “Why RFK Must Take on the CIA”

“Robert F. Kennedy told his children that physical courage was important because it served as preparation for the much more difficult and essential test of moral courage. If confirmed as secretary of health and human services, his son and namesake will need both. Implementing Kennedy’s agenda to “Make America Healthy Again” will require confronting extremely powerful and entrenched interests: not just Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Pharma, but also the Intelligence Community—more on which in a moment.”

Article at Compact Magazine

How Left Economists Have Challenged Economic “Common Sense”

Andrej Markovčič (John Jay MA alumnus) interviewed Arthur MacEwan and Zoe Sherman, editors of Dollars & Sense magazine on the history of “popular economics” for Jacobin Magazine.

 

As things currently stand, we are not doing very well in the United States at meeting even foundational needs to keep people alive and healthy: housing, food, medical care. And those things that we have in reasonable abundance, like clothing, are often produced in ways that involve unacceptable environmental costs and terrible labor conditions. (Things are, of course, better in some other parts of the world and much worse in many others.) And the extremes of income inequality we have reached distort every aspect of economic and political life. But there are plenty of good ideas about how to expand access to people’s basic needs, such as rent stabilization and public housing policies, and a public option or a straight-up single-payer system for medical insurance.

Read the full interview at Jacobin.