PEN offers progressive, op-ed style columns on the major economic issues of the day. Penned by CPE staff economists (and the occasional guest economist) who teach and do research on a wide array of issues, we offer careful analyses accessible to a wide variety of audiences, particularly social activists.
Resurrecting the Radical Keynes
Jim Crotty
The Keynesian economics that Paul Samuelson popularized in the United States after World War II was a sanitized version of the radical critique of capitalism offered by Keynes himself. John Maynard Keynes’s deep-seated attack on free-market economics led him to call for direct government control of the lion’s share…
Gerald Friedman
Last night, after a listless, dismal year during which the economy stalled and the Far Right set the fiscal agenda with their austerity cries, President Obama finally stepped up to the plate and demanded action to reduce depression-era levels of unemployment…
Heidi Garrett-Peltier
Polluting industries, along with the legislators who are in their pockets, consistently claim that environmental regulation will be a “job killer.” They counter efforts to control pollution and to protect the environment by claiming that any such measures would increase costs and destroy jobs. But these are empty threats…
David Kotz
In the US, artists and performers of all kinds have the possibility of “making it big” and gaining huge financial rewards. Conventional economic thinking assumes that such “incentives” should promote a high level of effort and achievement in the arts. Is a system that dangles a lot of money before prospective artists actually the best…
Internet Freedom: What’s at Stake?
Sue Holmberg
Since its public inception in the 1990s, the Internet has been a fairly open and democratic means of communicating and conducting business (at least for those with broadband access). This principle of equality, also called “net neutrality,” has enabled Internet users in myriad ways: to launch multinational companies in their…
Leon Trotsky, Theorist and Revolutionary
Alejandro Reuss
Mention the name of Leon Trotsky and you might be asked, “Didn’t he have an affair with Frida Kahlo?” (He did.) Or, “Wasn’t he murdered with an ice pick?” (He was.) He was also, however, known to dabble in revolutionary politics. The triumph of Stalin and his falsification of history have obscured Trotsky’s importance…
