‘American Dream’ Film: Communicating Economic Ideas Dramatically

I’m interested as much in the way ideas get communicated as the ideas themselves. What brings this to mind is the animated film I saw today called The American Dream. This is the most creative expression I’ve seen of the more non-mainstream view of economics — the idea that the Federal Reserve is an evil [...]

The annoying thing about The Big Oligarchy

The annoying thing about The Big Oligarchy … the banks the insurance companies the government the giant firms and their privileged controllers … is that you pay into It all your life through premiums, taxes, and the money It makes from the float on your cash … but then when you ask for the promised [...]

How Can Local Economies Transition to a Petroleum-Scarce World?

Today I read an interview in New Scientist with Rob Hopkins, a key figure in the Transition Towns movement — see “Rob Hopkins: Getting over oil, one town at a time.” He writes about how communities can transition to a more sustainable economy at Transition Culture. Hopkins describes the Transition Towns concept as follows: A [...]

Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops

Seeing the devastating effects on the lives of the people in Port au Prince, Haiti, in the wake of the recent earthquake emphasizes the potential value of emergency housing solutions for recovery. In such a disaster, survivors are thrust into chaos and forced to live in unstable, unsanitary conditions, seeking out housing any way they [...]

Pumping up the Big Bubble

From the Bubbleconomics point of view, the U.S. government’s efforts over the past year can be seen as an attempt to keep the Big Bubble pumped up. The current economic design requires a strong and powerful system of banking and investment, which is why the government has focused so much on propping up the banking [...]

Did “animal spirits” mess up the economy?

Could “animal spirits” explain the unpredictability of economies and the emergence of economic bubbles? Economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller believe so, as they explain in their recent book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Their use of the term “animal spirits” does not [...]

Would they really hack the planet to sustain economic growth?

President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren tells the Associated Press that he has brought up geoengineering as a possible alternative in the fight against climate change in discussions with Cabinet-level U.S. officials, as well as with heads of agencies such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency (see AP’s article “Obama looking at cooling air [...]

Ron Paul predicts 15-year depression

According to an article by Phil Davis in Financial Times yesterday, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul believes the U.S. economy could be heading into a 15-year depression: “The US government just won’t allow the correction the economy needs.” He cites the mini-depression of 1921, which lasted just a year largely because insolvent companies were allowed to [...]

The little bubbles on top of The Big Bubble

Writing yesterday for CBS News, Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET, says that the U.S. government is essentially throwing good money after bad trying to revive a bubble-based economy that was “erected on a rickety foundation of debt, leverage, speculation and interest rates held unreasonably low by the Federal Reserve.” (See “You Can’t Inflate a Burst [...]