Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s

If you argue long enough about economics, you are bound to run into the stagflation argument. The stagflation argument claims that the big state and stimulus caused high inflation, high unemployment, and poor growth during the seventies. Usually this argument is not fully argued by those who believe in it–it is merely asserted, and the rest of us are expected to accept that it is simply the case that the seventies happened that way. Today I’d like to endeavour to illustrate what actually happened in the seventies, what the real causes of stagflation were, and what sort of lessons might be pulled from it.

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Rise of the Machines: The Robot Economy of the Future

My attention has been drawn to a rather interesting phenomenon by Paul Krugman–that of a gradual shift in the distribution of wealth from labour to capital. As a percentage of the economic total, workers are earning less and less over time, and more and more of our output is landing in the hands of people who own capital–the land, the buildings, the tools, the machines that make things tick. This has interesting implications, and, if I might be permitted to speculate today, those implications may demand changes in how we view what we produce.

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Torture Ethics

Recently the film Zero Dark Thirty has been getting a lot of press both in the United States and abroad. It is interesting how the reviews differ–in the United States, the film is regarded as a patriotic thriller celebrating the vanquishing of an enemy, and has received mostly positive reviews. In Europe, however, it is seen to glorify torture and celebrate the various ethically dubious practises of the United States over the last decade in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would like to venture forth into this discussion of torture and whether or not it ought to be permissible.

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Keynesian Utilitarianism

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls draws a hard distinction between his prioritarian conception of justice and the utilitarian one. We have mentioned prioritarianism in the past, and indeed, this post is a bit of a synthesis of that post with this other one. Prioritarianism is the notion that a just society always tries to improve the welfare of the worst off before anyone else. In other words, the welfare of the poorest is prioritised. In contrast, utilitarianism is about maximising total welfare, regardless of the distribution. These theories seem at odds (indeed, Rawls wrote about utilitarianism as though he were very much at odds with it). Yet, if we adopt a few Keynesian economic principles, I believe the gap can be closed and the two theories shown to lead to more or less synonymous societies, or at least significantly more similar societies than is presently thought.

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Mental Health: Parents vs. Professionals

In recent days, much has been said of the need to bolster the quality of mental health care in America, given that the recent mass shooters have, for the most part, been victims of mental illness. While such a policy cannot be a substitute for controlling the weapons that, statistically, lead directly to violence, it is nonetheless very much the case that improving our collective mental health would also be helpful, not only in reducing the number of violent incidents, but in improving the quality of life for the millions afflicted with the wide array of mental disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. How might such an improvement begin to be made?

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