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Welcome to my homepage !
The "Projects" page includes information about our book Artists and Markets in Music (Routledge 2024) as well as other writings on political economy. Some of my research is also available on SSRN, RePEc and Google Scholar.
"Personal Info" has information about our Hardfire TV program on Brooklyn Free Speech Media and about the Reggae Sunsplash Preservation Society: we have created a film archive and are restoring, digitizing and streaming more than 200 hours of concert film from 1978 to 1994.
"Teaching" contains the lectures on the principles of economics I created for my Cameron's Teaching Modules YouTube channel during the pandemic period. I also have created a self-study course which combines both introductory macro and micro, the syllabus for which is available on the "Teaching" page.
On the "eBooks" page you can download Economics for Everyone, 2nd Edition, which includes a section on the Austrian School Explanation for the Business-Cycle, and which can help explain today's on-going inflation.
Thank you,
Cameron
Brooklyn, NY and Harlingen, TX USA
contact: cameron_weber@hotmail.com
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for something he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." - Robert Heinlein
University of California, Berkeley's Realtime Inequality data visualization project.
Note that many common measures of inequality exclude state transfers received by the poor, non-salary benefits received by the middle class and taxes paid by the rich. The Economist has a recent article about the current debate in economics over inequality, December 2023.
Wharton School analysis for proposed $1.85 trillion new federal spending which finds 'crowding-out' equals less poverty reduction than without this spending, November 2021. With a tight labor market and high inflation now is not the time for any demand-side stimulus. We have already had $5 trillion in covid-era related spending between the current and previous administrations.
The current version of the spending and tax bill is the Orwellian named "Inflation Reduction Act" for $700 billion. This passes in August 2022. With unprecendented easy money and federal spending it is no surprise that inflation will remain at least until the covd-era federal appropriations are disbursed. January 2024.
The Economist finds that the nationalism and protectionsim in the US's trade policy including the industrial policy in the IRA is creating a subsidy war with other nations, what we can call "race to the bottom" or "beggar they neighbor" foreign policy. January 2023.
Politically-based spending for votes today passes debt to those not-voting and those yet born. This has increased drastically in the last 15 years:
The risk rating for US government debt was downgraded in August 2023 due to the untenable debt situation, Wolf Street is good on this.
Wharton finds that student loan forgiveness, like inflation, is regressive: 70 percent of the forgiveness goes to more wealthy people, August 2022.
MIT and NBER find the Paycheck Protection Plan is distribution upward, and that it costs around $200,000 "per job saved". The average cost of employment in the private sector for wages and benefits is around $75,000. January 2022. The Federal Reserve Bank also finds that the PPP is regressive policy. July 2022.
NBER finds that federal covid "relief" transfers to states and municipalities cost more than $850,000 "per job saved". June 2022. Note that these transfers are also based on political party-affiliation patronage.
Arnold & Porter has created the CARES Act Fraud Tracker and has found that more than $150 billion has been stolen or fraudulent, updated often. March 2023.
"Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts Some People at the Top", J. Rothwell, NYT, November 2017. Those working in sectors protected from competition by government policy continuously receive super-profits and capture wealth faster than everyone else.
"If People Were Paid by Ability, Inequality Would Drop", Rothwell has another article related to the above, this one on how professional associations have historically excluded minority groups from membership, November 2019.
Edmund Phelps, New York Review of Books, "What is Wrong with the West's Economies?", August 2015. Utilitarian and Rawlsian philosophies as manifested in policy in the modern welfare state has reduced entrepreneurship, human creativity and self-determination.
"Monopoly Isn't Always What We Think It Is", J.R. Rogers, Law & Liberty, November 2018. If there are no barriers to entry, there is no monopoly. And who best to limit competition but the state with its monopoloy on legal coercion.
This is the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report of 2024 which determines the nation's fiscal health is unsustainable without substantive changes to welfare state entitlement programs.
Law and Liberty August 2022 article on what the Federal Reserve can do right and wrong, and needed reforms to reach that end.
This is T. L. Knapp's Freedom News Daily, a good news compiler.
This is something very funny, a Princeton professor lists on his CV all of his failures.
For fans of economics, here is a photo of the Economics Faculty building in Belgrade, Serbia (the center of economics for the former Yugoslavia).
From BYO Records, UK and from Nancy Folbre's website.
Here's Hayek's 1944 Road to Serfdom in cartoons, courtesy of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).
Paul Kelpe, Machinery (Abstract #2), 1933-34.
Here is the Living New Deal website, they have mapped more than 16,000 New Deal sites, including artwork. Although I think their economic program for today is faulty I support their historical work.
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