It took me quite a while to read it, but the Strike Debt document on all forms of debt really does a nice job of describing how the different forms of debt have such a heavy impact on so many groups of people. It focuses in especially on the groups of people that are discriminated [...]
I had been reading the Haves and the Have Nots for a month or so before finishing it two weeks ago. It’s an exposition on global inequality, including historical perspectives on the differentials between households within countries and across the world.
Economics in general have been a hot button for me lately. Realistically, since the 2008 bubble and [...]
Are you the infinitely curious type wanting to understand more about what’s happening in the world and what it means on a real time basis? No? TOO BAD! This one’s not for you.
I’ve always enjoyed looking at statistics about the US like at census.gov. It was a primary tool we used [...]
I read Mark Thoma’s blog regularly. It’s an economics blog, Mark seems to be a left leaning sort with a recent track record of endorsing government policy that backs stimulus in order to fight unemployment. It’s a good blog in that he reposts a great deal of economics articles that I otherwise wouldn’t look up.
Recently [...]
I always think it’s fascinating to look at the budget and where we spend. Here’s a quick graph that summarizes it from Off the Charts Blog:
That’s a pretty simple graph. It shows that most of our tax dollars are wrapped up in Defense, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Safety Net programs.
As readers of this blog [...]
It has been a long time since I’ve written. Partly due to inertia, but mostly due to activity. Over the last few months I’ve read four economics books and all of them seemed to be derived in conservatism. It was an interesting set of books and offered a ton of understanding on capitalism, conservatism, socialism [...]
I started in on the next Economics book, The Law (that’s the actual text!) by Frederic Bastiat tonight, and it was so sparse I read it in a little over an hour. I was not expecting that.
This is more a novella than anything and is really a just a longer essay that explains the sole [...]
The second of my four purchased Economics books is What Has Government Done to Our Money, written by Murray Rothbard. The book is actually a really great explanation of what “money” is and how it is established and manipulated by different people and government as well.
I touched on a primary concept of the book in a [...]
Well, actually, by definition, money is a commodity.
That’s why it was developed in the first place, to combat the inability to trade unlike skill sets or goods in barter. But the idea that money is a commodity and can go up in value or down in value caught me off guard. It’s yet [...]
The first book on economics I finished was a pretty good one. Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a very basic explanation of different concepts in economics, and although I’m not formally trained, it really seems to reemphasize the Invisible Hand concepts that were pioneered by Adam Smith.
Coming it at around 200 pages, [...]