In the second half of the 1990s, I worked as an economist for the City of New York. This was during the dot-com boom when everyday there was an article in the New York Times about the newest IPO multi-millionaire and the high tabs spent on dinner and drinks at Le Cirque. I made $36,000. My union had negotiated a five-year collective bargaining contract when the City was still recovering from the crash in the real estate market of the late 1980s, and as a result, our collective agreement specified a two-year pay freeze, followed by one, two and 4.5 percent pay increases in the subsequent years. What this meant was that public sector workers were having real pay cuts during one of the greatest economic booms in the city’s history. My pay was low by Manhattan standards and our holiday party was pot-luck, but my work was interesting, the benefits were good and I had the satisfaction of knowing that my job was safe and not subject to the whims of a boss.
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Just over one year ago, we created the Triple Crisis Blog as a forum for international analysis of the triple crises facing the world’s people, in finance, environment, and development. We now have a loyal and growing readership, and we would like to hear from more of you. We welcome and appreciate your comments on blog posts. Our writers read them and respond to as many as they can. Some posts generate a lively discussion (see Alejandro Nadal’s recent post), some get little comment.
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Little progress in WTO’s Doha talks
Triple Crisis blogger Martin Khor published the following opinion article for the Third World Network on the extreme demands being made on developing countries in the WTO Doha talks, which are set to close this year.
Few really wanted it started, and now no one knows how to end it. In between there’s been almost a decade of roller-coaster of the Doha negotiations at the World Trade Organisation.
Many political leaders have now proclaimed that the “Doha Round” must really be completed this year. Otherwise it may have to be abandoned altogether, some have predicted.
But there is not a lot of chance the deal will be done now. Although the main proposals on the table are already so imbalanced against the developing countries, the developed countries want even more from them.
Climate Change and the Water Crisis in the U.S. Southwest
Where and how will climate change first affect large numbers of American voters? Answering that question may be crucial to the global efforts to protect the earth’s climate. The tsunami of stupidity and science denial that has washed over Washington won’t be held back by earnest calculations of long-run risks, or by the potential inundation of remote island nations, or by the news that polar bears and other iconic species are endangered.
While climate change may seem remote, the water crisis in the Southwest is all too immediate. Recent years of drought have reached critical levels, threatening to curtail agriculture and even the normal patterns of urban life throughout the region. Even if today’s climate remained unchanged, water use in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah would more than double over the next century, just from population and income growth.
What Will New Economic Thinking Look Like?
The crisis that erupted in 2007 has generated interest in re-thinking economics. As Mark Blyth noted earlier this week, one of the more visible efforts in this respect is the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET, committed to promote “new thinking about how to reform our economic system and get economists to better serve our policy makers and our society”. That is certainly a good objective, but you still need to define several key words in that sentence, beginning with “economic system” and “policy makers”.
On the very positive side, INET’s executive director Rob Johnson says the Institute is still defining “on the fly what new economic thinking means”. This good news leaves the doors open for truly innovative thinking. On the other hand, several participants in the first INET conference in King’s College mention the magic words, “shifting paradigms”.
Triple Crisis Roundtable at the Eastern Economic Association Meetings
On Saturday, February 26, Triple Crisis bloggers Kevin P. Gallagher, Gerald Epstein, Ilene Grabel, and Matías Vernengo will be joined by Jane D’Arista and Leanne Ussher for a roundtable discussion on “CURRENCY WARS, G20 SKIRMISHES AND OTHER GOVERNANCE FAILURES”. The roundtable is part of the Eastern Economic Association Meetings at the Sheraton Hotel New York, at 10:30 am. Read contributions by Triple Crisis bloggers on currency issues, capital controls, and finance.
On Reagan’s Birthday We Still Celebrate His Policies That Broke the Middle Class
Triple Crisis blogger Jeff Madrick published the following opinion article on New Deal 2.0 on the mischaracterization of President Reagan’s successes and failures in the media coverage of his centennial.
As the nation celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday, the mischaracterization of his tenure as president is a national tragedy in itself. The media’s need to gloss over its glaring failures — failures that live on for all of us — is now so common that it hardly draws notice. If the media sometimes deigns to note that Reagan blundered in the Iran-Contra scandal — and almost surely violated the law, not to mention the much-adored U.S. Constitution — it is quick to repeat the stale, dreary myth that he was a “transformative” president. President Obama has apparently bought in.
He was transformative. He taught America to hate government and in the process created an economy that utterly failed to restore itself or the nation’s standard of living. He taught Americans not to be citizens who cared about each other but to ask what government did for them. And when asked, he distorted the answers. Does Obama truly not know this?
On Reagan's Birthday We Still Celebrate His Policies That Broke the Middle Class
Triple Crisis blogger Jeff Madrick published the following opinion article on New Deal 2.0 on the mischaracterization of President Reagan’s successes and failures in the media coverage of his centennial.
As the nation celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday, the mischaracterization of his tenure as president is a national tragedy in itself. The media’s need to gloss over its glaring failures — failures that live on for all of us — is now so common that it hardly draws notice. If the media sometimes deigns to note that Reagan blundered in the Iran-Contra scandal — and almost surely violated the law, not to mention the much-adored U.S. Constitution — it is quick to repeat the stale, dreary myth that he was a “transformative” president. President Obama has apparently bought in.
He was transformative. He taught America to hate government and in the process created an economy that utterly failed to restore itself or the nation’s standard of living. He taught Americans not to be citizens who cared about each other but to ask what government did for them. And when asked, he distorted the answers. Does Obama truly not know this?
Paradigms Lost? Cowboys and Indians in the Battle over Economic Ideas
One of the most interesting organizations to come out of the crisis is the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which is dedicated to “fresh insight and thinking to promote changes in economic theory and practice.” I attended its first conference in April 2010. The mood was optimistic. Rational expectations theories, the efficient markets hypothesis, capital account openness, Ricardian equivalence, were all on the chopping block. The book of the conference was Skidelsky’s The Return of the Master. We were all Keynesians now, again…for about eight months.
Then came the ECB June 2010 Monthly Report that raised the specter of ‘Ricardian consumers’ and ‘expectation effects,’ while the G20 meeting that same month (coincidence?) focused attention upon ‘Growth Friendly Fiscal Consolidation’ and the overwhelming need to reduce debt. Led by the UK (whose net debt-to-GDP ratio was at that time was below the Maastricht threshold) the voices of orthodoxy quickly regrouped and triumphed. Austerity and belt-tightening gained traction as the advocates of a reinvigorated Keynesianism shifted their sights from dismembering the neoclassical corpus to simply maintaining the legitimacy of spending under any circumstances.
Climate Change: The fatal disconnect
Triple Crisis blogger Sunita Narain published the following opinion article in Business Standard on the World Economic Forum’s analysis that climate change is the highest-ranking risk the world will face in the coming years.
The fatal disconnect
The World Economic Forum — the gathering of power glitterati each year in Davos — has assessed the top risks the world faces in 2011. According to this analysis, climate change is the highest-ranking risk the world will face in the coming years, when its likelihood and impact are combined. What’s even more important is the interconnections between climate change and the other top risks: economic disparity (ranked three), extreme weather events (ranked five), extreme energy price volatility (ranked six), geopolitical conflict (ranked seven), flooding and water security (nine and ten).
This is not a past or future scenario. This is the present. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says world food prices this January hit a “historic peak”. The food price index, collated by FAO, averaged 231 points in January, which is the highest since 1990, when it started measuring food prices globally. The reasons for the spike are not just the traditional, ranging from greedy speculators to faulty future markets and rising demand. They are newer: extreme weather events, floods and droughts, heat and frost waves. And they suggest a threat even more difficult to contain.