Mike Konczal
director. Economics, inequality. . Tired new dad. Book FREEDOM FROM THE MARKET (1/12/2021 ) 🍞🌹
Last synced from Twitter 859d ago
The World’s Best Bureaucrat
Intelligencer 84d 14 tweets
As chairman of the Federal Reserve during the pandemic, Jerome Powell has managed to do something almost unimaginable in Washington: a good job.
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Mike Konczal Great profile of Powell, his Fed tenure, and the covid crisis. Interesting argument that a moderate GOP chair could best advance liberal priorities of loosening in 2019, intervening credit directly in 2020, and significantly reevaluating NAIRU. 84d
Bodies on the Line | Dissent Magazine
Dissent Magazine - Dissent Magazine 106d 4 tweets
Introducing our Fall 2020 special section, "Technology and the Crisis of Work."
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Mike Konczal Latest issue is great. I've read a lot on service work, care work, platforms, and surveillance, but the section in the latest issue I think is the best set of articles synthesizing all of them I've seen. Here's the intro by / 103d
We can end America’s unemployment nightmare
Vox 119d 6 tweets
The problem with our social safety net is clear. The solution is, too.
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Mike Konczal A great thing about the massive yet temporary expansion of unemployment insurance is more people are talking about modernizing it in bigger venues, like in this great piece. UI really is a fantastic tool for fighting income insecurity. 116d
Nonfiction Book Review: Freedom from the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand by Mike Konczal. New Press, $25.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-62097-537-4
Publishers Weekly - PublishersWeekly.com 118d 1 tweets
Roosevelt Institute director Konczal (coauthor, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy) argues that “true freedom requires keeping us free from the market” in this persuasive and methodi
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Mike Konczal First capsule review of Freedom From the Market is up! Out January, pre-orders available. Love that they quote the phrasing “glib libertarian fantasies” as one of the things the book opposes in its quest to define freedom through suppressing the market. 118d
Democrats Need a Plan. Fast.
Nytimes.com 120d 13 tweets
Here’s how they can apply maximum pressure, brand the process as the illegitimate farce it is and lay the groundwork for desperately needed reform.
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Mike Konczal was on a similar strategy, re: boycotts and make it the nomination itself. 119d
How the Republican Party Took Over the Supreme Court
The New Republic 288d 5 tweets
The 50-year effort to advance a conservative legal agenda
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Mike Konczal For more on the uncharted territory aspect this by is excellent. 121d
Twitter
Twitter.com 122d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal As McConnell gears to rush a SCOTUS nominee in record time, a thread of quotes from the summer on how he felt no urgency to start working on a continued economic relief bill. We still don’t have one. The difference, while predictable, is no less shocking. 122d
A Bizarre Argument About the COVID Economic Response
People's Policy - Peoplespolicyproject.org 125d 3 tweets
Is cutting interest rates really a corporate giveaway?
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Mike Konczal Clean, clear and straightforward case against the case against the expanded QE package the Fed has executed post-CARES Act, by . An appropriate expansion of the monetary policy toolkit other countries have lead on. Two additional thoughts. /1 125d
A Free Market Manifesto That Changed the World, Reconsidered
Andrew Ross Sorkin - Nytimes.com 131d 27 tweets
Milton Friedman’s libertarian economics influenced presidents and inspired “greed is good.” So what did Friedman get right — and wrong? Today’s business leaders and economists weigh in.
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Mike Konczal NYTimes has a 50y retrospective on Milton Friedman's popularizing of shareholder primacy, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” with line-by-line commentary from smart folks. I discuss the essay in my book; some thoughts. /1 129d
In Defense of David Graeber’s Debt
Jacobinmag.com 138d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal David Graeber's Debt was just an amazing book, big ideas across history, insights from economic anthropology that were mind-blowing for those like me who had not encountered them before. For economics-minded readers, here's a great overview by 138d
A Gen-X Adviser to Biden Argues Equality Is Good for Growth
Nytimes.com 144d 25 tweets
Heather Boushey is at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline — just as the government deploys trillions to address a once-in-a-century emergency.
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Mike Konczal This is an excellent profile of and her work at , but it’s also an important document of a generational and ideological handoff in economic thinking. A change she has been at the forefront of. Worth reading. 144d
The Pandemic Hurts Countries That Don’t Value Workers
Foreign Affairs 153d 4 tweets
The diminished place of the worker in the United States helps explain the country’s poor management of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Mike Konczal This is an excellent dive by into how stronger European labor laws made it easier to manage the pandemic and better structure their economic response. It's a really key cross-country comparison point that gets overlooked. (1/2) 151d
Can Joe Biden Unrig the Economy?
The Nation 152d 2 tweets
Raising taxes on the rich would help stop the economy from simply channeling income to 1 percent.
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Mike Konczal Like a wealth tax, Biden’s tax plan raises $4 trillion dollars from the rich, but by aggressively taxing the income from wealth. It collapses the income of the 1% by 17%, and more up the ladder. It also poses questions to the Left on where taxes go next. 152d
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Mike Konczal Biden raises taxes $4 trillion on the very rich, knocking the income of the top 0.1% down ~23%. For now no need for mass taxation. Climate should be debt-financed as an investment, and, outside M4A, new programs can easily be funded by just the very rich. 149d
For a Full Economic Recovery, Debt Is No Object - Roosevelt Institute
Roosevelt Institute 152d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal Raising taxes on the rich is a good in and of itself, but remember the debt and deficit pose no obstacle whatsoever to the recovery we need from the pandemic and the investments necessary to fight climate change. (From two weeks ago, suddenly relevant.) 152d
Fixing Private Health Insurance
Nationalaffairs.com 212d 5 tweets
The Affordable Care Act has wreaked havoc on the individual insurance market, causing many healthy people to drop coverage, contributing to soaring premiums, and rendering individual-market plans almost worthless to most people. To mitigate these...
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Mike Konczal Must feel awful to be a conservative policy intellectual out here in 2020 writing plans to replace the ACA. You just had united control of Congress, President who'd sign anything, and an infrastructure around this singular mission; is next time the charm? 166d
As Pandemic Rages, the United States Slashes an Economic Lifeline
Foreign Policy 172d 1 tweets
Lockdowns and outbreaks have hit the poor hard—and governments worldwide are struggling.
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Mike Konczal “The unemployment insurance worked,” Konczal said. “It showed us that our government has the capacity to ensure people’s economic security through deep depression and global health crisis in a way that should surprise us.” I know how to kicker it, sayin. 172d
If the Filibuster Remains, the Progressive Agenda Is Doomed
The Nation 173d 1 tweets
It takes 60 votes for Democrats to build something, but only 50 for the GOP to tear it down.
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Mike Konczal Remember the asymmetry here. Because they use defunding and privatizing as their means, GOP agenda is not really blocked by the filibuster. It certainly wasn't in 2017-2018. It takes 60 votes to build something, but only 50 to tear it down in the Senate. 173d
The Populist Right Will Fail to Help Workers or Outflank the Left
Mikekonczal.substack.com 189d 7 tweets
No horseshoe theory is going to form, even as the populist right attacks neoliberalism, because of these five assumptions and arguments they make.
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Mike Konczal I wrote a blog, a deep dive into why there's going to be no left-right horseshoe alliance, no "post-left." The populist right will fail to help workers or outflank the left, even as they consciously attack "neoliberalism," because of these 5 assumptions. 189d
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Mike Konczal Of potential interest, but honestly probably not. 189d
The Origins of the Urban Crisis
Press.princeton.edu 210d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal Also if you are looking for a history about structural racism and the urban economy, 's classic "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" is 50% off and free shipping. 210d
Understanding the Recent Rise in Municipal Bond Yields
Kansascityfed.org 210d 2 tweets
The municipal bond sell-off in late March likely reflected investors’ concerns over liquidity rather than credit risk.
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Mike Konczal And even if we're doing the run-ending as a subsidy, the Fed also put a halt to the run in all asset classes, see this study on how the excessively high March 23rd rates for munis collapsed after Fed and Congress action. 210d
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Mike Konczal If the criterion for being rescued by the Fed is that the interest rate you face fell after March 23rd, then the Fed rescued every state and municipality in the country. 129d