Welcome to my homepage. Here you will find my research and other items which might be of varying degrees of interest.
The Projects page includes information about the North American Workshop on Cultural Economics to be held in Fort Lauderdale in November 2022 and about our book on political economy and music.
The research for the book includes a musician's survey to help understand changes during the covid-era and beyond, here is the survey (all responses voluntary and confidential). Take the survey and then pass it along to others if you think that it is valuable. We tried to make it an opportunity for musical artists to think about their craft over this recent period. It is a grassroots "snowball" survey, it hopefully gains momentum and value as it rolls along.
See Personal Info about Hardfire TV our monthly talk-show on Brooklyn Free Speech Media and information about the Reggae Sunsplash Preservation Society where we are creating and digitizing a film archive of this historic music festival.
I am taking a hiatus from teaching until the book is finished.
Thank you,
Cameron
Brooklyn, New York USA
contact: cameron_weber@hotmail.com
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell

University of California, Berkeley's Realtime Inequality data visualization project, March 2022.
Here is Wharton School analysis for proposed $1.85 trillion new 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.
Wharton also finds that costs of living are up $3,500 per family annually due to loose Fed monetary policy and government covid-era spending, something which of course harms those with less income and wealth because the poor have less disposable income to pay for increasing costs of living, December 2021.
MIT and NBER find that the Paycheck Protection Plan was distribution upward, and that it costs around $200,000 "per job saved". The private sector creates employment while the state saves it, January 2022.
The law firm Arnold & Porter has created the CARES Act Fraud Tracker, and has found that more than $150 billion has been stolen or fraudulent, updated often. State spending is other people's money (OPM), no residuals means reduced stewardship over scarce resources, February 2022.
"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 March 2021 which determines the nation's fiscal health is unsustainable without substantive changes to the welfare / warfare state.
Here is TrackTheRecovery.org, which Harvard and Brown universites call "Real-Time Economics: A New Platform to Track the Impacts of COVID-19 on People, Businesses and Communities Using Private Sector Data."
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 toady is faulty I support their historical work.
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