There are still people out there who seem to believe that fighting the climate crisis is somehow in opposition to progress. That it will hold the economy back. The exact opposite is the case. Fighting the climate crisis is the most pro-progress program we can embark on. Driving an EV is a superior experience to driving a car with an internal combustion engine. I say this as someone who has driven a great many high end German cars. Using modern heat pumps combined with solar can save many hous...

I have been meaning to write a blog post about Marxism following an exchange in the comments to one of my posts about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Essentially the thrust of the comment was that Marxism is a bigger threat in the US today than fascism. I disagree with this assertion, but I do think that the extremes to which we have taken capitalism have opened the door for a resurgence of beliefs that it needs to be toppled entirely rather than shrunken dramatically, as I propose in The Wor...

Now that we are finally going on lockdown here in the US in order to flatten the curve of the COVID19 crisis, we also need to take drastic measures to put the economy on suspended animation. In particular, I propose the following for the duration of the lockdown:Suspend all interest, mortgage, rent and similar payments Permit companies in non-essential industries to suspend wage payments. Pay everyone a Universal Basic Income of $600/month Federally back all health insurers and in return forc...

The word “growth” has become one of the focal points of the climate crisis debate. There are those who are worried that pricing carbon will slow down economic growth. And there are those who believe that the only way we can overcome the climate crisis is through degrowth. I fear that most of those debates will be people shouting past each other as the word growth has come to capture entire philosophies of thought. And so instead of having meaningful in-depth arguments about what kind of socie...

I have not been blogging much because I have been working on my book, but many people have asked me about the markets. So here are my thoughts. Much of the recovery in the labor market since 2008 had been driven by jobs in the oil and gas industry. These were high paying jobs that went into parts of the country that otherwise are struggling economically. A lot of US production, however, is profitable only at oil prices of $60/barrel and above (some are saying $80/barrel). Crude oil is current...

Capital is no longer scarce. This is an assertion I made a while back in my post “Land, Capital, Attention: This Time it Is the Same.” Today I want to elaborate on that a bit. Estimates put global investible capital at north of $100 trillion. Global GDP by comparison is around $80 trillion and as an approximation global gross output is likely around $160 trillion. It is important to keep in mind that the capital needed to just operate a steady state economy is meaningfully less than gross out...

I have been away for two weeks in Europe. The first skiing and the second meeting with startups in Berlin. As usual while traveling I took a break from blogging which I find helps me in a couple of ways. First, it frees up some more time for reading and I finished two interesting posts (more on those in separate posts). Second, it also gives me a bit more time to think about the bigger picture. And when I do that I unfortunately come back to the my “Is it 1880 or 1914?” post. Most of us worki...

Over vacation I read “How Much is Enough?” by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. I highly recommend the book as it goes after a central question that we should all be asking both individually and collectively. The book starts with an excellent chapter on Keynes’s now frequently cited essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Their basic diagnosis of where Keynes went wrong is that he assumed a separation of needs and wants, expecting our economy to grow rapidly enough to provide for ...

The secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important – it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. If you want a lot of detail you can read through Marc Andreessen’s epic secular stagnation tweet storm and all the great source material that he links to. At the heart of the secular stagnation discussion is the idea that somehow the economy is growing more slowly than it should. See for instance the following quo...

Last week I was in Detroit to speak at Techonomy’s one day conference there. I had never been to the city before and enjoyed meeting Mike Duggan, the mayor, Beth Niblock, CIO, and many other people working hard to turn things around. It is a fascinating window into challenges I believe we will face more broadly going forward. Here are the video, the slides and a transcript of the talk. (Transcription by RA Fisher Ink) Kirkpatrick: Good job, thanks so much. You know, like I said before, in the...