Dear Branko, Thank you for your comment stemming from reading Ultrasociety. It’s a very clear and coherent statement of what many (if not most) mainstream economists believe, although they don’t usually care to formulate it as well as you did. Naturally, I disagree with it—my whole bo

Two weeks ago I went to a studio in Amherst, MA, to participate in a BBC Forum on Hierarchy. It was broadcasted last week, and you can listen to it here. I arrived at the studio in plenty of time, but there were inevitable SNAFUs. First, I couldn’t get into the building (not sure why

Yesterday I wasted several hours, thanks to Oracle Corporation. When I turned my computer on, there was a message from Java bugging me to install a security update. These updates are a pain, and usually I try to ignore them and hope they go away after repeatedly telling them ‘no.’ The

At the end of my second blog on democracy and oligarchy in Ukraine, I came to a gloomy conclusion that there would be no real effort to curb the power of the oligarchs, and that it will be the common Ukrainians who will have to bear the costs of reforms. All this came to pass even fas

In my previous blog I came to the conclusion that during its post-Soviet history Ukraine has become a Kevin Philips nightmare. No matter who gets elected there, they are either oligarchs, or oligarch stooges. It appears that the oligarchs not only control the parties that compete agai

The title of today’s blog echoes the influential book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, published by the American political commentator Kevin Phillips in 2002. It’s a great book. Among other things, Philips came up with a way to quantify the dynamics of

To recap, in the first installment I pointed out that the three post-war decades were remarkably clean, in terms of corporate malfeasance. Then, during the 1980s, there was a series of scandals primarily involving insider trading. The trend really intensified during the 2000s, when we

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–8 which triggered the Great Recession had many causes, not all of which are well understood. But it is clear that one of the most important factors (if not the most important) was the general atmosphere of corporate greed, hubris, and fraud that pea