Two posts ago, I rehashed the point that owners of capital income do not produce it and therefore have no desert-based claim to it. One post ago, I responded to the rebuttal that they do in fact do work to receive capital income, namely the work of deploying and managing capital. In that post, I rehashed the point that capitalists don’t do this work, but rather money managers and executives (who are paid) do it. So, it would seem, we really do have 30% of the national product flowing out to...| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
I have been pointing out recently that defenders of laissez-faire capitalism shift between philosophical frameworks when they are arguing, something I call capitalism whack-a-mole. They do this because there are no normative frameworks that justify laissez-faire capitalism and so there is no other way to actually muster an argument in its favor other than opportunistically moving between frameworks. (Click here for an amusing example of this phenomenon.)| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
In high school and college, I became very interested in economic philosophy, specifically theories of distributive justice that seek to establish criteria for determining whether a particular distribution of resources within a society is just. When I started this website in 2011, I wrote a lot about these topics, including these two pieces about desert… Continue reading Desert and Capitalism Again| mattbruenig.com
In high school and college, I became very interested in economic philosophy, specifically theories of distributive justice that seek to establish criteria for determining whether a particular distribution of resources within a society is just. When I started this website in 2011, I wrote a lot about these topics, including these two pieces about desert theory in 2014 and 2015 that have been excerpted for recent discussions on X. These days I don’t really write about it much, though I did re...| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
This post was originally intended for the launch of the People’s Policy Project website. But as that is running behind schedule, I figure I will post it here.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result, consume them much differently and can explain in great detail why a particular work is good or bad, but they are the distinct minority.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
The “Success Sequence” is explained most recently as follows:| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome. More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility in the world, and in parts of Europe where fertility has been declining since 2010.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party. Chronology Yglesias’s first critique is about the chronology of it. NAFTA was enacted in the 1990s while this most… Continue reading Yglesias on the Politics of NAFTA| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
In 2021, I had solar panels installed on my roof. They began generating electricity in January of 2022. In early 2023, I wrote a piece detailing how the finances of all that worked based on the first year of solar production. This is a follow up to that piece but now with three years of data covering 2022, 2023, and 2024.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts. There was no primary campaign that featured a candidate championing these causes. Harris did not run on them.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Lowering Costs Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals that all ostensibly relate back to lowering prices.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Joe Biden put up an issues page on his campaign website late last month. I have been publicly wondering when, if ever, we would get some kind of formal policy platform from Biden, and so I am happy to see that now there is one. Unfortunately, Biden’s list of issues does not really contain much actual policy content.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
The prevailing consensus in the economics literature is that women suffer a significant earnings penalty after they have children. More precisely, women who have children end up with lower earnings than women who do not, holding all else equal.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Yale announced today that it will reinstate a requirement that applicants to the school submit scores from a standardized college admissions exam. Yale says that making these tests optional is harming low-income students whose scores could have helped them get in.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Over the past few months, various authors at various institutions — specifically Oscar Arce, Elke Hahn and Gerrit Koester at the ECB, Andrew Glover, José Mustre-del-Río and Alice von Ende-Becker at the Kansas City Federal Reserve, and Paul Donovan at UBS — have written pieces about the relationship between profits and the most recent bout of inflation. Advocates of what is often called the “greedflation” hypothesis of inflation have taken to pointing to these pieces as proof of that...| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Erik Loomis wrote about the Diane Ravitch v. Michelle Rhee stuff. I don’t care about the majority of the content of this conflict. More arts funding? Ok I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t particularly like arts classes. I liked gym class. How about more of that? I don’t know: leave it to some pedagogy experts or something to figure out.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
As regular readers know by now, I am fairly skeptical of the Education Reform Movement. I am not convinced that the reforms advocated by this well-funded movement will actually work because I suspect that the real problem is economic inequality, not bad schools or bad teachers. But even if one believed that the policies pushed by the reformers would be successful, a question then arises: successful at what?| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Between June 2020 and and January 2022, used car prices, which had been stable or declining for 25 years, increased by nearly 60 percent. Since then, they have come down a bit, but remain quite elevated relative to June 2020.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
In order to get more protein in my diet, I frequently consume Fairlife Nutrition Plan protein shakes. They have 150 calories, 30 grams of protein, and taste just like chocolate milk. It’s a great product, but, at the prices Fairlife charges for the shakes, demand regularly outstrips supply, making it quite difficult to actually find the product available for purchase.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com