Archive for the ‘economics’ tag
Understanding economics: International finance, liberalization, etc.
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Ever since Adam Smith in the 18th century extolled the prospects for mutual gain inherent in free trade between nations, economics textbooks have tended to classify economic policies as either "welfare-enhancing" or "welfare-reducing." One implication of this tradition is that a macroeconomic policy ought to be judged on the basis of whether it provides [...]
Understanding economics: A few basics
About five months ago, I posed myself a few questions, relating to such matters as currency exchange rates, trade deficits, and public debts, in an effort to enhance my understanding of economics. I currently live in Argentina, a country where periodic financial crises have repeatedly thrown the country into disarray and economic depression. [...]
Legal threats to the Internet and Open Source
The field of information technology–particularly the rise of the Internet and a related phenomenon, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)–provides an interesting prism through which to view contemporary ideological conflicts in the political and economic realms. Both the Internet and FOSS are powerful testimonies to the fertility of the public domain, at a moment [...]
Some alternative economic and political visions
While filing away some readings from the first trimester of my graduate program in international studies–a period that included courses in international relations theory and international trade–I came across two items that concisely present powerful challenges to prevailing orthodoxies in economics and politics. They are, respectively, a summary of Norwegian economist Erik Reinert’s project [...]
The Cash Nexus
Niall Ferguson. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
In The Cash Nexus, published in early 2001, historian Niall Ferguson endeavors to undermine approaches to history based on economic determinism, replacing them with an interpretation that instead privileges "political events." This approach enables him to dispense [...]
Understanding economics
One of my motivations for enrolling in a course of study in international relations is the opportunity it gives me to fill in the (huge) gaps in my understanding of economics. Studying organizations like the WTO and phenomena like international finance is a good way to get started toward an understanding of how the [...]
Hurricane Katrina, limited government, and pure public goods
Having absorbed more than a week’s worth of U.S. media commentary (primarily via the Web) on the federal government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’d like to round up some highlights here, draw a few tentative conclusions about the political significance of that response, and relate those conclusions to some other developments. The [...]
On economics and self-interest
An article in the February Southern Cone edition of the leftist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique drew my attention to an article by Hazel Henderson and to a surprising piece of information: The so-called "Nobel Prize" in economics is not a Nobel Prize at all, but rather a distinction conferred by the Royal Bank of Sweden, [...]
Two books on “market fundamentalism”
Globalization and Its Discontents, by Joseph E. Stiglitz
One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank
Globalization and Its Discontents
Hardcore anti-globalization activists likely greeted the 2002 publication of Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents with the sense that a justification of their protests from a mainstream, authoritative source had arrived. After all, Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist [...]