A sustained and increasingly technical argument about European economic performance has been running across economics blogs and Substacks since early 2026. The starting gun was fired by Seth Ackerman in a series of posts in February — “Eurpoors vs. Florida Man,” “Europe’s productivity keeps outpacing the US,” and “Productivity statistics, Paul Krugman, and Hicks’s shadows…
Category: Theories of economic value
The Radical Irishman Who Got There First: Labour, Specialisation, and the Price of Things
William Thompson published his Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth in London in 1824. He was an Irish co-operative socialist, a follower of Jeremy Bentham, and a passionate critic of the political economy of his day. He was also, I now believe, one of the most penetrating economic theorists of the nineteenth…
Greedflation in 2023
Today a report was released of the think tanks Common Wealth and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) about the causes of inflation. This report confirms that in our contemporary economy, inflation is significantly driven by greed and profiteering by transnational corporations. The report is summarised here. Traditionally, in economics, inflation has theoretically three…
Thoughts on the UK’s “Day of Brexit”
Today, on 31 December 2020, at 23:00 local London time, the UK will formally leave the international socio-economic space created by European nation-states through a number of international treaties since the end of the second world war. It is a turning point in the sense that the UK deliberately diminishes its reach in the global…