Tag Archives: economic modeling

J.W. Mason kicked off the latest skirmish in the never-ending macro wars with his Jacobin article "A Demystifying Decade for Economics." (Note: at the time of writing, the article was taken down until its publication in Jacobin.) This prompted a Twitter debate about representative agent macro, which eventually led to this Beatrice Cherrier article on heterogeneous agent models. In my view, the debate about representative agent models is a red herring. Mainstream macroeconomists main skill...

Keynes and the fundamentals of probability.Lars P. Syll’s BlogTruth and probabilityLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Jan Hatzius made some macro projections about wages, unemployment, and inflation: Goldman’s Jan Hatzius wrote Sunday that unemployment should continue to decline to 3% by early 2020, noting the labor market also has room to accommodate more wage growth. Hatzius predicted that average hourly earnings would likely grow in the 3.25% to 3.50% range over the next year. ... For now, Goldman has a baseline forecast of 2.3% for core PCE ... Well, these are all roughly consistent with Dynamic...

Not MMT, but you may find this of interest. In the context of the radical Macroeconomics Course I am teaching, I was very unhappy with the material available which tries to explain what Keynes is saying. In attempting to explain it better, I constructed an extremely simple model of a primitive agricultural economy. This model has a lot of pedagogical value in that it can demonstrate many complex phenomenon in very simple terms. In particular, Keynesian, Marxists, Classical and...

Recommended reading on the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of economics, and Milton Friedman's instrumentalism.EvonomicsEconomists Should Stop Defending Milton Friedman’s Pseudo-science George H. Blackford | former Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan-Flint

Jason Smith comments on J. W. Mason and Arun Jayadev on MMT and conventional economics from the point of view of scientific modeling in macro.Information Transfer EconomicsWhat do equations mean?Jason Smith

Weekend thinking.Thoughts On EconomicsA Semi-Idyllic Golden AgeRobert Vienneau

My paper is a survey of the huge amount of solid empirical evidence against the utility maximization hypothesis that is at the core of all microeconomics currently being taught today in Economics textbooks at universities all over the world. It is obviously important, because if what it says is true, the entire field of microeconomics needs to be re-constructed from scratch. Nonetheless, it was summarily rejected by a large number of top journals, before being eventually published by Jack...

Since econometrics doesn’t content itself with only making optimal predictions, but also aspires to explain things in terms of causes and effects, econometricians need loads of assumptions — most important of these are additivity and linearity. Important, simply because if they are not true, your model is invalid and descriptively incorrect. And when the model is wrong — well, then it’s wrong.... Simplifying assumptions versus oversimplification.Lars P. Syll’s BlogThe main reason why almost...

Krugman again.  Keynes quote, too. Lars P. Syll’s BlogOh dear, oh dear, Krugman gets it so wrong, so wrongLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University