Tag Archives: economic modeling

The problem with economics as a discipline, and this generally includes all forms of economics including heterodox economics to some extent, is "economics." That is is to say, economists assume that economics is chiefly or exclusively about economic behavior when economic behavior is embedded in social and political behavior and includes the entire "human condition." The only "economist" that really grasped this in depth was Karl Marx, and he was a philosopher coming from a Hegelian...

The implication here is "formal model." But formal models are not the only sort of models. Most models we use are conceptual and they are mostly sufficient to the task. For example, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein showed how a descriptive statement is a model of a fact that allows for comparing the model to the fact observationally to determine it truth-value. He elaborated how the propositional calculus is used to to describe many fact in using the principles of descriptive logic to...

I hope that this model will be taken up by more colleagues as it is very clear now that the IS/LM model “does not work”. If you make it more realistic by saying that investment does not depend on the rate of interest (vertical IS curve) and that the central bank determines the interest rate (horizontal LM curve), then you will have wasted 3-4 lectures to explain the goods market (IS curve) and the money market (LM curve) only to conclude that both do not matter in practice. It is only a...

This is important but may be too wonkish for those who are not intimately familiar with econometrics. So let me try to simplify it and universalize it. The basic idea in logical reasoning is that an argument is sound if and only if the premises are true and the logical form is valid.  Then the conclusion follows as necessarily true. This is the basis of scientific reasoning. In modeling, a set of assumptions, both substantive and procedural, is stipulated, that is, assumed to be...

Rather than attempt to explain what the mainly neoclassical economists are going on about, I want to step back and try to translate their debate into terms that would be understood by people who do not share the same assumptions. I am pretty sure that post-Keynesian economists have a lot to say about the topic as well, but once again, they tend to be discussing wonkish points that would elude an outsider.…I have an engineering background, and engineering is largely the science of...

Why conventional economics is a failed project. It's the approach to assumptions. Lars P. Syll’s Blog The logic of economic modelsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Stephanie Kelton interviewed. Modeling this is a huge undertaking. The WeekMedicare-for-all has a modeling problem Jeff Spross

After seven years of economic research and developing forecasting models that have outperformed the experts, author, blogger, and physicist Dr. Jason Smith offers his controversial insights about the major driving factors behind the economy derived from the data and it's not economics — it's social changes. These social changes are behind the questions of who gets to work, how those workers organize, and how workers identify politically — and it is through labor markets that these social...

Abstract Professor Yasuhiro Sakai (see 2016; 2018) has argued that there is an mysterious problem in the A Treatise on Probability, 1921 in chapter 3 on page 39 (page 42 of the 1973 CWJMK edition). He argues that there is an unsolved mystery that involves this diagram that has remained unexplained in the literature. The mystery is that Keynes does not explain what he is doing in the analysis involving the diagram starting on the lower half of page 38 and ending on page 40 of chapter III....

All of the above, of course, is simply the fleshing out of assumptions. We assumeddiminishing productivity in the last hours, we assumed heightened productivity from a shorter working week and we assumed declining marginal utility of goods and services produced. Finally, we assumed a preference for free time over a vanishingly small increment of total income. The point is that each of these assumptions were relatively modest but when combined "add up" to a rather substantial cumulative...