J.W. Mason on economics, policy, and political economy.
I’ve just put up an essay by Arjun and me — a sketch of the earlier history of the debates we discuss in Against Money. We originally wrote this as a chapter for Against Money, but ended up not including it. I’ve lightly edited it to make it work better as a s…
I was recently in Sri Lanka, where, thanks to our friend Ahilan, Arjun and I were able to meet with a number of people in the new left-wing government there. The challenges and opportunities there are something I hope to write more about more in the future. Bu…
by Arjun Jayadev and J. W. Mason Last year marked a watershed: For the first time in history, growth in renewable generation exceeded global growth in electricity output, causing fossil fuel power generation to decline for the first time on record. But 2025 al…
I apologize for lack of content on this blog-slash-newsletter lately. Among other excuses, I’ve just been elected chair of the John Jay Economics Department. Many of you know how that goes. A chair is not a boss, they are just the department’s representative w…
TLDR: The value of corporate equity relative to GDP is at a historical high. But this does not necessarily mean there’s a bubble: profits and shareholder payouts are also very high relative to historical values. I first started thinking about economics thirty…
The following is a somewhat expanded version of testimony I presented on June 23 before the New York City Commission on Government Efficiency. My name is Josh Mason. I am an associate professor and chair of the economics department at John Jay College, CUNY, a…
(I had a long conversation yesterday with Eric Levitz of Vox about the New York City rent freeze and the economics of rent regulation. I have posted the interview below just as it appeared there, for my archives and in case people want to read it without deali…
Last week, the Rent Guidelines Board voted for a freeze on the rent for New York City’s one million rent-regulated apartments, fulfilling one of Mayor Mamdani’s defining campaign promises. There has been plenty of discussion of the decision, both supportive an…
The other day, Laura and I were standing on the subway platform, on our way to see Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, when a young man walked up to us. Well, up to me. “Are you the author of this book,” he asked; he had a copy of Against Money. I said that I was,…
Against Money is now out. It’s been spotted in a number of bookstores, including the Union Square Barnes and Noble, where it turns out to be shelved next to Marx’s Capital in the Business section. As my friend Suresh said to me the other day, as writers we sho…
Arjun and I did a webinar recently on our book Against Money, organized by Merijn Knibbe. We’re very grateful to him for putting it together, and should have video to share soon. Even in a friendly setting like this, it can be a challenge to explain what the r…
This is the edited transcript of a talk I delivered on March 5 at the Heilbroner Center for the Study of Capitalism at the New School for Social Research in New York, at the invitation of Julia Ott. The talk is an attempt to explain what Against Money (my fort…
(This piece was originally published at Phenomenal World, in cooperation with the New York Policy Project.) With the failure of Eric Adams’s last-ditch effort to stack the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now in a position to fulfill his pr…
Every year, I try to write a post about books that I’ve read in the past year. This time, I found myself writing so much about some of the books, that the post was getting unmanageably large. So I’ve split it in two. This is part one; part two will follow. Geo…
Readers of this blog know I have a book coming out later this spring — Against Money, officially out on May 7. Plenty of money-related content coming between now and then. But today I’m writing about a different book: Dear Mother, a collection of poems by Laur…
Along with Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in last month’s elections, New York City also approved three housing-related ballot proposal. Together, these will make it somewhat easier to adjust land-use rules to allow for new housing development, by reducing t…
This piece was coauthored with Arjun Jayadev and Ahilan Kardirgamar. It was first published in Project Syndicate, and republished in The Daily FT in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is currently undergoing its worst economic crisis since Independence. The austerity measur…
After publishing the previous post, I received the following email from Christoffer Stjernlöf, which I thought was worth sharing: I enjoyed your latest article on the September Jobs Report – these statistics come with interesting connections and assumptions wh…
(This was originally posted on the website of the Groundwork Collaborative, where I am a senior fellow. I’m hoping to be doing these more regularly in the future, so if there’s anything that would make them more useful or interesting, please let me know.) The…
As you certainly know, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York last Tuesday. Indeed, if your life is like mine, you may feel you’ve been hearing about little else. The other day, as I was biking my younger kid to school, a young guy pulled up next to us w…
I wanted to put down some thoughts on Large Language Models (LLMs), or so-called artificial intelligence. I apologize that this post is not going to include any links or quotes or data. It’s just an effort to work something out in my own head – something that…
Last week, I did a couple of interviews with Brian Edwards-Tiekert of KPFA: one about what the latest BLS employment data is telling us, and one about the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates by a quarter point – in part in response to that data. Having give…
(I am an occasional contributor to roundtables of economists in the magazine The International Economy. The latest roundtable invited contributors to imagine some unexpected development we might see over the next decade – “an outside-the-box speculation on mat…