Peer2Politics

During the long run-up to officially announcing her second presidential bid, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quietly — but not too quietly — reached out to a number of leading progressive economists. Along with experts from some of the biggest unions in the country, the list of Clinton conferees included some of the biggest names in the (small) world of left-wing economics: former Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, for example. Yet out of all the so-called boldfaced names intended to draw lefty wonks’ attention, none inspired more cautious optimism than that of Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

In some parts of Europe, negative interest rates are creating absurd situations. In France, some corporate bonds pay interest to the issuer because they were linked to a benchmark rate that has dropped below zero. In Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, banks are turning depositors away with threats of negative interest rates. If this goes on much longer, we'll be living in the world of "free money" imagined by the economic dreamer and adventurer Silvio Gesell in the 19th century.

David Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics. He is the author of the classic “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years” and played an important role in the launching of Occupy Wall Street. Last year, he wrote a much-discussed essay asking what happened to society’s old promise of more leisure time for workers; for the tasks that have come to occupy the hours that were once promised to be ours, Graeber invented the delicate and slightly obscure label, “bullshit jobs.”