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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Rearranging the deck chairs

Partly because I got interested in communism, which draws novel and deep connections between economics and politics, and partly to understand the current financial crisis and subsequent depression, I began reading a lot of capitalist economics blogs, including Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and others.

When I first started reading them, the authors seemed to be looking deeply at the fundamental economic, political and sociological underpinnings of the crisis. Lately, however, most of them (with the exception of some posts at naked capitalism) seem to have just given up, talking about the nitty-gritty details of the financial reform bills in Congress and the bailout of the Greek economy. Even Krugman, who's fairly pessimistic about Greece (as well as Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain, who are headed for similar trouble) seems to have just stopped looking at why our economy and financial systems are in trouble. At worst, they're arguing over the new arrangement of chairs on the Titanic, over the color of the band-aid on our gaping economic wounds; at best they're pessimistically noting that band-aids won't help without really talking about what would help.

There are a few exceptions, but lately I find myself skipping over most of the economics blogs I read. Ho-hum, another critique/apology for the not-even-half-assed Congressional finance reform bill or Greek bailout.

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