Donald Trump is pushing ahead with his protectionist agenda, and possibly with good reason. There were over 17 million manufacturing jobs in the US in 2000, in the 10 years that followed, China joined the WTO and the US lost about a third of those jobs. In this edition of the Debunking Economics podcast Phil Dobbie asks Steve Keen whether protectionism is valid in this day and age. What of the conventional philosophy that trying to do everything locally avoids economies of scale and pushes prices up for everyone? Steve’s argument, you need a complex economy to produce efficiency and innovation. It’s the lack of protectionism that has stymied growth in many economies. But there are exceptions, especially for an Elon Musk fan boy like Steve!
Economics
GPEnewsdocs – Prabhat Patnaik: Imperialism then and now: Wealth, unemployment and insufficient demand
Prabhat Patnaik reviews the connections between imperialism and capitalism through history to stress that by necessity of the accumulation of wealth, somewhere demand has to be suppressed to provide cheap inputs to ‘the markets’. That […]
Austerity
Michael Hudson – Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy
2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the stock market crash of 2008; the current financial malaise is the result of the bank bailouts, not the crash; an over-indebted economy cannot be saved unless the banks […]
Economics
Yanis Varoufakis – Internationalism vs Globalisation
Globaisation is in crisis. Good news, but why are we not celebrating and what should follow? Listen here
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