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Is ailing Greece the start of a new Europe? New economic models arising from the ruins of the bankrupt growth economy, and now citizens take their own control over supply and demand. Many Greeks are gradually coming to terms with the collapse of a failing social and political system. They are taking matters into their own hands and addressing crucial issues through grassroots activism and local collective action. There are signs of a lifestyle transformation,...
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Twenty-six million Americans depended on the defense budget for their livelihood; with the end of the Cold War, many defense workers lost their jobs. Seymour Melman, was then chairman of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament, which studied ways to convert military spending to economic redevelopment. In this program with Bill Moyers, Melman discussed ways to convert military spending to peacetime uses, as well as how the importation...
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Green Interview host Silver Donald Cameron presents a documentary on Bhutan that focuses on the country's unique and inspiring pursuit of "Gross National Happiness" as a vision for development; it is in stark contrast to the rest of the world's reliance on Gross Domestic Product. Included are interview clips with Prime Minister Jigme Thinley and Genuine Progress Index founder Dr. Ronald Colman?
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In 1977, the federal court system told the Reserve Mining Company to build a $400 million disposal site for carcinogenic materials. After 1970, Los Angeles was looking for a broad-ranging smog-reduction policy to reflect recently amended Clean Air Act standards. In 2009, the House of Representatives introduced the first piece of comprehensive clean energy legislation, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which both economists and energy...
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By 1925 Great Britain went off the gold standard, managing to increase exports and lessen imports. The U.S. market was flooded with British goods and U.S. industry suffered. In July, 1944 world economic leaders met in Bretton Woods, NH for a "new world economic order" and soon the dollar became the new standard. In 2002 the Euro became the standard currency for the entire European Union and threatened to compete with the dollar. These stories portray...
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The U.S. auto industry lost a lot of mileage in 1973 with the rise of the more efficient Japanese imports. In the 1970s, the "trigger/price mechanism" was developed in order to differentiate between fair and unfair trade practices. Debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) included accusations that American jobs would suffer and American firms would relocate south of the border. Others insisted that increased trade would create new...
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A two-year drought in California in the 1970s motivated areas such as Marin County to conserve by reducing their water consumption by as much as 66 percent. Following the Arab oil embargoes of 1973, the Nixon administration latched onto the world price of "new" oil, encouraging domestic oil suppliers to drill againches Jordache designer jeans used creative advertising to create a demand for blue jeans. These stories illuminate factors that determine...
11) Productivity
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In the 1970s, businesses struggled with rising energy costs, newly imposed environmental regulations, and inflation that contributed to the slowing of productivity. By 1980, a new group of economists called "supply-siders" were calling for government deregulation to spur productivity, amidst great objections from Democrats and some economic experts. Some thought that productivity was at an end, but government-supported technological innovation spurred...
12) Boom and Bust
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The nation's cycles of economic booms and busts were considered intrinsically capitalistic by Joseph Schumpeter who called them "methodic economic growth," and by Karl Marx who lambasted capitalism as inherently flawed. John Maynard Keynes held that recessions depended on the balance of aggregate demand and aggregate supply. Economist Hyman Minsky provided a promising explanation for the Great Recession of the 21st Century with his theory that the...
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In 1937 the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government-owned utility company, was created to electrify rural communities and control flooding. 1965 marked the first U.S. attempt at national health insurance in the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. In response to 9/11, the U.S. Transportation and Security Administration replaced private security firms with federal employees. A perfectly competitive market does not always provide the right amount...
14) Reducing Poverty
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After the Great Depression President Franklin D. Roosevelt put forth a social security program, using money from employer/employee wages. In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act, providing childcare assistance for mothers in the work force. The Perry School for Community Services, a Washington, D.C. poverty-reduction program, offers after-school programs for kids and vocational programs for adults, including recently released...
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The Federal Reserve was originally created in 1913 as an emergency lender to banks- a sort of bank of last resort. The Banking Act of 1935 and the Fed Accord of 1951 broadened the powers of the Fed, widening the range of options and tools it could use to manage the economy. Up to about 2010, the Fed did fairly well. But the housing bubble and Great Recession provided it with new and substantial challenges. These stories showcase the Fed's capabilities...
16) Oligopolies
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Competition with General Motors eventually rendered Ford's single-option Model-T obsolete. In 1959, a reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel discovered a price-fixing scandal between three big-name electric companies in each of their closed bids to the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter ordered Professor Alfred Kahn to deregulate the airline industry, which had been a federally protected oligarchy. These are all...
17) Fiscal Policy
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In 1954 relying on "automatic stabilizers," President Dwight Eisenhower withheld raising taxes in order to encourage consumer spending. In the 1960s, newly elected John F. Kennedy and economic advisor Walter Heller pushed Congress to approve a $12 billion tax cut stimulus. The Employment Act of 1946 was the first time that government tried to employ fiscal policy. But, by 2010 economists disagreed about whether fiscal policy was dead, as they argued...
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Farmers lured into producing massive food surpluses for WWI could no longer profit when the war ended and demand plummeted. After 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to improve the conditions of farmers via policies in his New Deal plan. Government subsidies later allowed for corporate ownership of a majority of farmers. The Freedom to Farm Bill of 1996 gave farmers a little more maneuverability, but for the most part farmers are still held...
19) Stagflation
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1970s America saw a new kind of inflation, based on supply and not demand: "stagflation," caused by Arab oil embargoes and worldwide crop failures. In 1973 President Ford and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns tried to control inflation by choking the money supply. They failed. In the 1990s the U.S. had three ways to ease inflation: Technological innovation, market globalization, and expenditure restraint. Demand management policies fight cost-push inflation...
20) Monetary Policy
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Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker pushed us through two deep recessions using monetary policy and increased interest rates to combat inflation in the 1980s. His successor Alan Greenspan used a different tactic in the early 1990s and 2000s: flood the market with liquidity to prevent freezing. And under Chairman Benjamin Bernanke the Fed has struggled to combat the ravages of the Great Recession in the first decade of the 21st century. These stories...