Notre Dame undergrad (math); JD, Indiana University at Bloomington; 1st Lieutenant, US Army.; private practice in corporate and securities law; Assistant AG in Tennessee for consumer protection and securities; Blue Sky Securities Commissioner, Tennessee; private practice, bankruptcy and corporate law.
I have had a lifelong interest in economics. For most of my career, that interest was practical, focused on the problems in front of me. Lately I have been more interested in economics as a theory, especially its impact on the lives of people like those I met in my bankruptcy practice, and on the politics of money in the US. I also enjoy reading philosophers, starting in college and steadily expanding my reading ever since. I wrote at FireDogLake for a number of years.
Generally, I think the problem facing the US is the dominance of neoliberal discourse. I think it clouds the vision, and limits the kinds of problems that can be identified and solved. For example, the existence and danger of climate change can easily be identified in a scientific discussion. However, the problem does not fit the neoliberal discourse because science insists that the pursuit of individual and corporate self-interest will lead to devastation. In neoliberal discourse, the pursuit of self-interest always leads to Eden.
The neoliberal project has two prongs. One is the police function of crushing dissent and alternative views. The police function is provided by government agencies and private and institutional actors. The counterpart is the economic system , which is operated by government and by private and institutional actors. Some of these actors operate in both spheres. I focus on the second prong.
I’ve put up several weedy posts explaining my view of the terms Market and Market Economy. In this post I pull back to see how this all fits in with neoliberalism. The basic idea of 19th Century liberalism was stated by Milton Friedman in this essay: This development, which was a reaction against the authoritarian […]
In this post, I give a proposed definition of the term “market”: A market is the set of social arrangements under which people buy and sell specific goods and services at a specific point in time. Social arrangements means all of the things that constrain and organize human action, including laws, regulations, social expectations, conventions, […]
Over several posts, I have criticized standard economic textbook definitions of market, here and here. I neglected to mention one, the idea that markets are an emergent phenomenon; here’s a discussion of that lunatic definition. Here’s my proposed definition: A market is the set of social arrangements under which people buy and sell specific goods […]
It is an article of faith in the US that the free market system is the best possible system for allocating scarce resources. Samuelson and Nordhaus have a long explanation of the glories of this kind of allocation. Economics 2005 ed. P. 26. One source for this idea is the early neoclassical economist William Stanley […]
The US economic system is based on what we’ve all agreed to call free markets. The entire system is often called the free market system instead of the capitalist system. I’ve been looking for a definition of the term market. 1. Textbook Definition. Samuelson and Nordhaus define markets early in their textbook Economics (2005 ed.): […]
I’ve written a pair of posts at Naked Capitalism on the neoclassical theory of marginal productivity as an explanation for the distribution of income in our neoliberal market economy. The first is based on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and examines the bloated pay of top management. The second focuses on pay for […]
In this post, I talked about the intersection of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics. There is a lot of talk on the left about neoliberalism, and a number of ideas about what it is. For me, neoliberalism refers to the general program of a group of economists, lawyers and othes loosely grouped around the […]
I’m new here as a poster, so I’ll start by describing my interests. As you may know from my work at Firedoglake under the name masaccio, I’m interested in the way the economy actually works. That’s why I like the work done by Thomas Piketty and his colleagues on wealth and income inequality: he has […]