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Tag Archives: economics and ideology

Noah Smith — Economists Lose Credibility When They’re Too Certain

They made this mistake by claiming free trade had no downsides. I wouldn't say it is just free trade.  This is what happens when ideology trumps scientific rigor, and scientific credibility is used to push a political agenda. Economists appear to fall into this trap often enough to have destroyed their public credibility. It's another form off fake news.  As Noah Smith points out, they know better, but do it anyway. Now they and we, are reaping the whirlwind of rabid populism as the...

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Erik Reinert — Towards a better understanding of convergence and divergence: or, how the present EU strategy – at the expense of the economic periphery – neglects the theories that once made Europe successful

This new working paper attempts to address some of the main problems of the European Union today. The main thesis is that the Weltanschauung and the economic narrative on which the European project has been based have changed radically since the inception of the European Project, from one conducive to convergence and cohesion to another which is conducive to divergence and, in the last instance – I shall argue – to a form of internal colonialism towards the economic periphery. The field of...

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Jason Smith — Corporate taxes and unscientific economists

Another takedown. But let's take this result at face value. So now we have a largely model-independent finding that to first order the effect of corporate tax cuts is increased wages. The scientific thing to do is not to continue arguing about the model, but to in fact compare the result to data. What should we expect? We should a large change in aggregate wages when there are changes in corporate tax rates — in either direction. Therefore the corporate tax increases in the 1993 tax law...

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