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Category: Economics/Business

Republicans increasingly express fear that Trump’s trade war with China will harm the U.S. economy

Republicans increasingly express fear that Trump’s trade war with China will harm the U.S. economy

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The New York Times reports: The trade war between the United States and China showed no signs of yielding on Thursday, as Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told lawmakers there was no clear path to resolution and Beijing blasted the administration over its approach. Mr. Mnuchin, who has tried to avoid calling the trade tensions with China a “war,” said talks with Beijing had “broken down” and suggested it was now up to China to come to the table with…

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How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system

How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system

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Antonio García Martínez writes: California is the future of the United States, goes the oft-cited cliché. What the US is doing now, Europe will be doing in five years, goes another. Given those truthy maxims, let’s examine the socioeconomics of the “City by the Bay” as a harbinger of what’s to come. Data shows that technology and services make up a large fraction of citywide employment. It also shows that unemployment and housing prices follow the tech industry’s boom-and-bust cycle….

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How the pharmaceutical drug economy became a racket controlled by Wall Street

How the pharmaceutical drug economy became a racket controlled by Wall Street

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Alexander Ziachik writes: Donald Trump’s plan to lower prescription drug prices, announced May 11 in the Rose Garden, is a wonky departure for the president. In his approach to other signature campaign pledges, Trump has selected blunt-force tools: concrete walls, trade wars, ICE raids. His turn to pharmaceuticals finds him wading into the outer weeds of the 340B Discount program. These reforms crack the door on an overdue debate, but they are so incremental that nobody could confuse them with…

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Chinese investment in the U.S. has plummeted 92% this year

Chinese investment in the U.S. has plummeted 92% this year

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CNN reports: Chinese investment in the United States nosedived in the first five months of 2018 amid mounting tensions between the world’s two largest economies. For years, Chinese companies pumped growing amounts of money into the United States, deepening ties between the countries. But Chinese investment totaled only $1.8 billion between January and May. That’s a 92% drop compared to the same period in 2017, and the lowest level in seven years, according to a report released Wednesday by Rhodium…

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Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

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The Atlantic reports: A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere. If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it…

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Under Trump, ‘America First’ really is turning out to be America alone

Under Trump, ‘America First’ really is turning out to be America alone

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Susan B. Glasser writes: The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was less than forty-eight hours away from hosting the biggest diplomatic gathering of his career when I spoke with one of his top advisers on Wednesday afternoon. Trudeau’s team was searching for strategies to salvage the annual G-7 summit with the American President, Donald Trump, and leaders of five of the world’s other large democratic economies—all of them close allies of the United States, and all of them furious with…

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IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

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GreenBiz reports: Swedish furniture giant IKEA has promised to outlaw single-use plastic products across its entire product range and in-store eateries by 2020 and ensure zero emission home deliveries as standard by 2025, as part of a sweeping set of new sustainability goals. The firm also promised to design all its products in line with circular principles and using renewable and recycled materials, and reduce the climate footprint of its wares by an average of 70 percent per product by…

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‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

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The Guardian reports: Plunging prices for renewable energy and rapidly increasing investment in low-carbon technologies could leave fossil fuel companies with trillions in stranded assets and spark a global financial crisis, a new study has found. A sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2035 is likely, according to the study, given the current global investments and economic advantages in a low-carbon transition. The existence of a “carbon bubble” – assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because,…

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World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

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HuffPost reports: Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns. The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible. The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change,…

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How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

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By Diana Crow The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid climate “freeze-dries” everything, including centuries-old trees that once grew on lava flows in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. A recent study of the tree-ring record, published in March, from some of these archaic logs reveals a drought that lasted nearly seven decades—one of the longest in a 1,700-year span of steppe history—from A.D. 783–850. Decades of prolonged drought…

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William Morris’ vision of a world free from wage slavery is finally within reach

William Morris’ vision of a world free from wage slavery is finally within reach

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Vasilis Kostakis and Wolfgang Drechsler write: At the beginning of the 21st century, a new world is emerging. Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our socioeconomic life. A new commons-based mode of production, enabled by information and communication technology (ICT), what we now call digitisation, redefines how we (can) produce, consume and distribute. This pathway is exemplified by interconnected…

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The real villain behind our new Gilded Age

The real villain behind our new Gilded Age

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Eric Posner and Glen Weyl write: The comedian Chris Rock once said, “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Populist revolts throughout the world may not count as street riots, but they do reflect disenchantment with not just our government but also liberal democracy itself. In the past two decades, growth rates in the United States have fallen to half of what they were in the middle of the 20th century….

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In America’s new civil war, one side must win

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

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Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira write: This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day. The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers….

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MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

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The Guardian reports: The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years. The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature…

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Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism

Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism

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By Tim Rogan, Aeon Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the…

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Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

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Josh Hall writes: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain reads the title of a 2017 book. From currency speculation through to verifying the provenance of food, blockchain technology is eking out space in a vast range of fields. For most people, blockchain technologies are inseparable from bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been particularly visible in the news recently thanks to its hyper-volatility. Crypto-entrepreneurs have made and lost millions, and many people have parlayed their trading into a full-time job. But…

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