Tag Archives: economics profession

Book review.American Affairs REVIEW ESSAY–The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory by Philip Pilkington Marc Morgan | research economist at the World Inequality Lab of the Paris School of Economics.

1. Profit as surplus labor or as a property-based claim One idea threatening to the defenders of the status quo is the recognition that profit income reflects capitalist property relations rather than productive contribution.…  2. Capitalist economies are demand constrained   The Keynesian or Kaleckian principle of effective demand may not seem quite such a hindrance to defenders of the status quo as knowledge of the nature of profit, but the motivation for its denial – at least in the...

It is Wednesday and I have a long trip by plane and road to Victoria where I am speaking at a major business conference in the mountains outside of Melbourne tomorrow morning. So only a few things today that I have been thinking about. Remember the 2010 film – Inside Job – which documented how my profession had become corrupted by the financial services sector into producing, allegedly, independent research reports extolling the virtues of deregulation etc and not admitting they were being...

One of the dominant themes of the last century was this general assumption that human activities can be studied through an ever increasingly rational lens. That may be, but economists then went too far: they projected rationality into the subject of study. Instead of using the tools of reason to tease out regularities of interest, they made the subject matter itself entirely rational. So the regularities they thought they saw were simply echoes, or mirrors, of their own thought...

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 assumption of isolated individuals transacting in free markets has underpinned highly damaging economic policies since the 1980s. Given the interdependent nature of the digital world, economic researchers need to ditch their unscientific attachment to this paradigm and instead focus on the economy of the 2020s. The 2020s will be the decade when the idea that economic problems can be “left to the market” to solve is finally put to rest – after some 40 years during which that belief has...

As many mainstream macroeconomics try to reinvent themselves after their reputations were trashed during and in the aftermath of the GFC, some are still trying to stay relevant by recycling the usual trash about deficits, public debt and bond yields that defines the New Keynesian orthodoxy in macroeconomics. That approach has been emphatically exposed as fake knowledge by the fact that none of the predictions that can be derived from that framework have proven to be accurate. On December 9,...

Economists can take consolation that they beat politicians anyway.Lars P. Syll’s BlogPublic trust in economistsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

There is no substitute for the ‘big picture’. Economists should not be doctors but social scientists, or more accurately they should develop an economics that recognises the wider social forces that drive economic models, in particular, the social mode of production that is capitalism. That is political economy, mostly not taught in universities and certainly not practised in international agencies.... Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economistEconomics as a social...

One of the stark facts about the academic economics discipline is its insularity and capacity to deliver influential prognoses on issues that affect the well-being of millions with scant regard to the actual consequences of their opinions and with little attention to what other social scientists have to say. The mainstream economists continually get things wrong but take no responsibility for the damage they cause to the well-being of the people. A 2015 paper – The Superiority of...