TRUMP’S COUNTIES Now we know.  There are two groups of economic losers who supported Donald Trump, and who support him still.  There are remarkable differences between the two, however. The first group, described as working-class folks, reside predominantly in economically blighted counties.  According to Brookings, the counties where Donald Trump beat Joe Biden contribute less […]

Stan Brewer watched over Ogden’s Dinner Horn Market, as its proprietor.  He also served as a community leader, not unlike Mitt Romney, during his sojourn in Boston, as its Mormon Stake President, and later as the Massachusetts Governor. Mostly, Buss and his parents loathed Mormon dignitaries, describing them as power-hungry authoritarians.  Brewer and a few […]

FATHER WAS A MORMON OUTCAST Buss hated Mormons.  Father had some Mormon friends, though.  More precisely, Buss hated the Mormon Church.  He wore a Masonic ring, proclaiming subtly, he told me confidentially, members of his Illinois brotherhood murdered Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, in a hail of gunfire at the jail in Carthage on June 27, […]

FRAUD!  FRAUD!  FRAUD! Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains why American capitalism is under enormous stress.  In “People, Power and Profits” (2019) Stiglitz observes, while the relative income share claimed by rent is increasing, the shares flowing to labor and to productive capital are decreasing.  What has changed in recent years he asks, to tilt America […]

BILLIONS AND BILLIONS HOARDED A broad reading of Keynes suggests this.  Equilibrium in market economies is a special case, but not a universal one.  Hoarding becomes evident when the aggregate difference between quantity demanded and quantity supplied, grows.  During the Great Depression, hoarding took the form of “gold hiding under mattresses” in anticipation of exploding […]

JM Keynes, the planet’s standout economist at mid-Twentieth Century, died prematurely in the year following World War II’s windup.  One wonders.  Is there a path toward understanding what Keynes might contribute now, if he happened to be living in our time? There is.  Indeed, it’s hiding in plain sight, illuminated by the contribution of Twentieth-Century […]

America’s at a tipping point. Populists vent anger borne of economic humiliation, even as they fall further behind the mainstream.  It’s an economic and political crisis without parallel since the Great Depression, almost a century ago.  Cambridge economist JM Keynes was the intellectual architect of the 1930’s rescue of capitalism.  His insights, advanced through the […]

I took the call from my maiden Aunt Leona.  Uncle Myron and his idiosyncratic wife Marjorie—Republican activists and occasional pranksters—were piloting their black Cadillac limo to the Utah Governor’s office from Leona’s home in Ogden.  “Expect their arrival at the State Capitol momentarily,” Leona announced resolutely. My octogenarian aunt and uncle were pre-World War II […]

Three centuries ago, a new vision of how our world works was taking shape in Scotland.  We’ll call it Enlightened Capitalism.  It was based on emerging democracy, upon the right to hold private property, and upon the free exchange of goods and services without government looking over citizens’ shoulders. Adam Smith was an 18th Century […]

If pragmatism is to be resurrected in American economics and politics, the methodology of John Maynard Keynes remains as the best starting point.  However, because real economies evolve in complexity—and because economic ideas stagnate and loose vibrance—Keynesian-type thinking needs rebirthing.  The best intellectual pathway for renewal ought to start with Joan Robinson, Keynes’ student.  Her reflections on what she called the profit lacuna are a solid gateway toward the development of some sort of in-between theory dealing especially with all sorts of fraud.  Beyond economics, it might also pour balm on America’s culture wars.  Capitalism in Crisis dot Org is about fleshing out these compelling possibilities.