Post-Keynesian

For the purposes of this very simplified and schematic post, I present the CCC as having two sides. Views and achievements of Cambridge (UK) critics: Joan Robinson's argument for models set in historical time, not logical time. Mathematical results in comparing long-run positions: Reswitching. Capital reversing. Empirical results and applications. Rediscovery of the logic of the Classical theory of value and distribution. Arguments about the role that a given quantity of capital plays in...

Here are three: Anthony Giddens, in The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1999), advocates a renewed social democracy. He contrasts what he is advocating with neoliberalism, which he summarizes as, basically, Margaret Thatcher's approach. Giddens recognizes that more flexible labor markets will not bring full employment and argues that unregulated globalism, including unregulated international financial markets, is a danger that must be addressed. He stresses the importance of...

Figure 1: Random Patterns in Life and Flip Life1.0 Introduction I have occasionally posted about automata. A discussion with a colleague about Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science reminded me that I had started this post some time last year. This post has nothing to do with economics, albeit it does illustrate emergent behavior. And I have figures that are an eye test. I am subjectively original. But I assume somebody else has done this - that I am not objectively original. This...

Figure 1: National Income and Product Accounts1.0 Introduction This post contains some speculation about technical progress. 2.0 Non-Random Innovations and Almost Straight Wage Curves The theory of the production of commodities by means of commodities imposes one restriction on wage-rate of profits curves: They should be downward-sloping. They can be of any convexity. They are high-order polynomials, where the order depends on the number of produced commodities. So no reason exists why...

Figure 1: Blowup of Distribution of Maximum Rate of Profits This post extends the results from my last post. I think of the results presented here as providing information about the implementation of my simulation. I do not claim any implications about actually existing economies. I did not have any definite anticipations about what I would see. I suppose it could be of interest to regenerate these results where coefficients of production are randomly generated from some non-uniform...

Figure 1: Probability a Random Economy Will Be Viable I have begun working towards replicating certain simulation results reported by Stefano Zambelli's. At this point, I have implemented a capability to generate a random economy, where such an economy is characterized by a single technique. A technique is specified by a row vector of labor coefficients and a corresponding square Leontief input-output matrix. The labor coefficients are randomly generated from a uniform distribution on...

By Philip Pilkington, a macroeconomist working in asset management and author of the new book The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory. The views expressed in this interview are not those of his employer Ever since the Enlightenment many societies have moved away from justifying their existence and formulating their aims through recourse to religious language. Gone are the days of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ which justified the natural and...

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of his employer. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States will likely go down in history for any number of reasons. But let us leave this to one side for a moment and survey some of the collateral damage generated by the election. I am thinking of the pollsters. By all accounts these pollsters – specifically the pollster-cum-pundits – failed miserably in this election. Let us...

Hi everyone – or, at least, whoever is left out there. As you probably know, this blog has been shut down since October 2014 and I have pretty much fallen off the face of the planet. Actually I’ve been working in investment where I’ve found a job that allows me to pursue non-mainstream economic research. Some of you may recall that I was writing a book during the last days of this blog. I’m happy to say that this book is now fully completed and has been accepted for publication by...

I have an article up on Al Jazeera this week. It may be the last journalistic article I write for some time as I start a new job next week. But this one deserves some brief discussion because the material it deals with is hugely important to the politics of the moment. In the article I discuss a joint report by the ILO, the OECD and the World Bank. The ILO have clearly spearheaded this one. It has their fingerprints all over it. The ILO are pretty fantastic really. They are one of the...