Econ-Atrocity Bulletins

Over at the Boston Review, Michael Piore and Andrew Schrank’s recent article (“Trading Up: An embryonic model for easing the human costs of free markets”) on labor in Latin America offers a spot of good news. They’ve been studying labor inspections throughout the region, from the Dominican Republic to Mexico to Brazil and Chile, and say they’ve found “an emergent model for reconciling market and social forces.”
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The 2006 Election(s)
By John J. Fitzgerald

The 2006 Election cycle has come and gone. Just like the 2006 Hurricane season it has not performed exactly as predicted, but it has left some changes in its wake. We might actually have experienced several different elections rather than just one. A lot of decision-making got formalized on the 7th of November.

Here are some of the highlights:
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For all that social sciences are able to figure out patterns of behavior, there’s one thing that guarantees a continuing need for old fashioned history analysis: the existence of totally unpredictable twists and turns in culture and politics.

Now I can’t say with any confidence that the recent fall from grace of Rev. Ted Haggard, until this past Thursday the president of the huge and hugely influential National Association of Evangelicals and leader of a megachurch in Colorado Springs, will be one of those surprisingly pivotal events. But there’s a distinct possibility that his outing as a repeat customer of male prostitution could lead to major changes in US policy and cultural attention towards global warming.
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By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist

As I write this, it appears likely that after 12 years in the wilderness, the Democrats will capture a majority in the House of Representatives and will make substantial gains in the Senate. (My favorite objective source, http://www.electoral-vote.com/, gives the Democrats a 225-208 lead in the House and a gain of 4 Senate seats to move to 49-51 in the upper body.) After 6 years of almost uninterrupted one-party rule, and the worst government this country has endured since the 1850s, we can only rejoice at Democratic gains as, if nothing else, a sign of a return to sanity after the trauma of September 11, 2001. But, beyond this, what can we expect from the Democrats? Can we anticipate a reversal of Bushism, and a renewed push for social progress?
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