Federal agencies and others have long used historical data to estimate the risks and potential costs from extreme weather events. Given the reality of climate change, these data may be increasingly unrepresentative of future conditions. As a result, government and private orgnizations may be underestimating the need for the investments that will make existing and newly constructed infrastructure resistant to the effects of changing climate. In this Working paper, Robert Repetto and Robert Easton play out just such a scenario, estimating the potential economic impacts of relatively intense hurricanes striking the New York City region.

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In this review written for India's Economic & Political Weekly, Robert Pollin explores the major themes of Prabhat Patnaik’s new book, The Value of Money. Pollin describes Patnaik's critique of monetarism, his concept of "propertyism" as a way to describe the Marx-Keynes-Kalecki tradition, and his understanding of the role of poor countries in supporting global capitalism. Despite some omissions--notably, a lack of discussion of financial markets or the role of the state, and few references to the relevant scholarly work of the past fifty years--Pollin describes this volume as "an original, surprising and highly stimulating synthesis of ideas."

>> Download "Roots of Capitalist Stability and Instability," a review of The Value of Money by Prabhat Patnaik

In this study, produced in collaboration with the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier update their 2007 analysis of the relative employment impacts of public investment in military versus other priorities, expanding their analysis to include clean energy investments and induced job creation. The authors compare the effects of a $1 billion investment in the military with the same investment in clean energy, health care, education, or individual tax cuts. They show that non-military investments create many more jobs across all pay ranges. With a large share of the federal budget at stake, Pollin and Garrett-Peltier make a strong case that non-military spending priorities can create significantly greater opportunities for decent employment throughout the U.S. economy than spending the same amount of funds with the military.

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In this new Working Paper, Christian Weller examines whether retirees built up enough wealth to weather the financial crisis. In the decades preceding the crisis, the financial risks associated with saving for retirement were increasingly shifted onto individuals, away from the public and employers. In theory, this growing responsibility should have gone along with more saving and less risk taking.  Weller uses data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances to assess whether retirees, were, in fact, able to build up sufficient wealth to compensate for their increased risk exposure, and discussess the policy implications of his findings.

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In a new PERI Working Paper "Socialization of Risks without Socialization of Investment," University of Utah Economics Professor and PERI Research Associate Minqi Li examines the destructive cycle which comes about when a large government sector encourages excessive private financial risk, leading to financial fragility and crises, which in turn lead to government interventions requiring deficit spending, creating a tendency for government debt to rise in relation to GDP. Eventually, there could come a point at which debt to GDP ratios could compromise the government’s ability to stabilize the economy during crises. Professor Li discusses the “Minsky Paradox”-- based on the work of Prof. Hyman Minksy-—in this context: while big government capitalism requires government bailouts to keep the financial markets from collapsing, each bailout encourages further financial risk, thereby creating the need for even larger bailouts in the future. Li makes the argument that addressing this structural contradiction “may require nothing short of a comprehensive socialization of the basic means of production.”

>> Download “Socialization of Risks without Socialization of Investment: The Minsky Paradox and the Structural Contradiction of Big Government Capitalism”