Archive for August, 2024

Ukraine’s Hiroshima moment is drawing closer (the consequences of Neocon madness)

Wednesday, August 21st, 2024

In August 1945, the US atom bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, nuclear weapons have never been used in conflict. That may soon change as Ukraine faces the increasing likelihood of a Hiroshima moment.

Conditions in Ukraine increasingly give Russia military and geopolitical cause to use tactical nuclear weapons. Though Russia will use them, the US and NATO are deeply implicated in the process. They are in the grip of Neocon madness which casually dismisses potentially catastrophic consequences and blocks all off-ramps.

Lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

One way to understand the current moment is via the history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Those attacks also had military and geopolitical motivations. The former is widely recognized: the latter is not.

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Paul Davidson (1930-2024) and the founding of Post Keynesian economics

Monday, August 5th, 2024

Paul Davidson was a critical figure in the preservation of John Maynard Keynes’s ideas, sticking with them when they were out of fashion. He was also key to the survival of the Post Keynesian school. Davidson endorsed Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of interest, and he emphasized fundamental uncertainty as a central feature of economic reality, essential to making sense of a monetary economy. His greatest legacy is the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the intellectual home for a generation of Post Keynesian economists. Without his efforts, the heterodox economics community would be significantly smaller than it is now.

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