Category: Economics

Courtesy of Colorlines and @sandraholla, I came across the above video. In it, a resident of East New York stands in front of a Banksy street art piece that popped up in his neighborhood, and demands that people pay him $20 to take a picture of it. It is a little unclear how this is… Continue reading The Coase Theorem Is Alive and Well in East New York

Salon has an article today about Walmart. At one point, it drops into the very rote and boring line that Walmart kills 1.4 retail jobs for every 1 retail job it creates. This line comes from a Neumark et al study called “The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets.” Technically, this is not an… Continue reading Walmart and Jobs: Stop

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt: In America Beyond Capitalism (2005) and What Then Must We Do? (2013), Alperovitz details a strategy for moving beyond our present slate of economic institutions by democratizing wealth at the local level. Or to put it more bluntly: Alperovitz’s strategy is to shift the ownership of productive assets, bit… Continue reading Policy Shop: Making Equality Local

Jesse Myerson has an interesting piece about apartment rent out today. The piece is mainly about about how such rents are unearned income for landlords, who are thus like lords in the feudal sense of the word. Myerson then goes on to propose ways to deal with that. I wont talk too much about the… Continue reading Landlords and capitalists

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt: A less notable excuse has been that our unemployment woes are structural—the skills employees have are not the skills employers want—and therefore economic stimulus wont do much to solve our unemployment problem. The STEM myth has been a major element of this structural unemployment theory, at least when it… Continue reading Policy Shop: The STEM Myth