Tag Archives: economics profession

For the last four decades, mainstream economists and policymakers have been wedded to fixed dogmas. Their blind belief in fiscal discipline and consolidation, and resulting refusal to consider more public spending even in an obvious downturn, now threatens the very stability of societies.... Project SyndicateOur Shrinking Economic Toolkits Jayati Ghosh | Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University,...

Along those lines, I have a modest proposal. Eliminate the economics Ph.D, period. Offer everyone three years of graduate economics education, and no more (with a clock reset allowed for pregnancy). Did Smith, Keynes, or Hayek have an economics Ph.D? This way, no one will assume you know what you are talking about, and the underlying message is that economics learning is lifelong. Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek were philosophers, and Keynes was a mathematician. Karl Marx, who goes...

MMT to the rescue. Sojourners No More Economic Malpractice: African-American Faith Leaders Take On The Establishment Delman Coates See also VOXA generation of economists helped get us into this mess. A new generation can get us out. Jared Bernstein | Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama Administration

More than a decade after the global financial crisis, macroeconomists have failed to absorb three crucial sets of lessons. Their models are still struggling – and mostly failing – to cope with disruptive change, and with the fact that both balance sheets and inequality matter.… Stating the obvious but it that most at the top don't get it yet. Project SyndicateWhat Economists Still Need to LearnMark Cliffe is Chief Economist and Head of Global Research of the ING Group. Also of interest...

I always enjoy reading Thorstein Veblen, partly because his writing strays back and forth across the line between "raising questions of real interest" to "just plain old dyspeptic and cantankerous." His 1918 essay "The Higher Learning In America:A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men" is full of comments from both categories, often closely overlapping. It's also the source of one of the liveliest insults to the field of economics, that economics is "a `science' of...

The problem is not so much with the modeling, actually. People are free to construct any models that please for whatever reason. The problem is with the conclusions that are drawn from the model when they exceed the limitations of the of the assumptions.This is not a problem with modeling but with logic. Drawing conclusions that exceed the scope and scale of the premises in a context other than the model is flat out illogical, and any inferences drawn on this basis are unsound, that is, do...

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

My fundamental understanding of the world has been warped by a now challenged approach. I'm not alone.… In the end, the chief byproduct of my general education exposure was a kind of indoctrination into the centrality of markets to understanding human behavior and the apparent importance of economics professors. I’m not alone. Introductory economics could be one of the most widely received credits in all of higher education. And unlike other common courses (like say, first-year writing),...

Another argument for paradigm shift away from the neoclassical model in economics. It no longer fits the facts (if it ever did). The "free market" that neoclassical economics assumes, the atomism of methodological individualism, and other such assumptions based on "simplifying," are myths concocted partly for methodological convenience ("mathematical tractability") and partly owing to ideology (cognitive bias). Theoretically, this would just be a curiosity of history, like the "ether" and...

A must-read (not least because of the interview videos where Leijonhufvud gets the opportunity to comment on the ‘madness’ of modern mainstream macroeconomics)! Axel Leijonhufvud's On Keynesian Economics And The Economics Of Keynes: A Study In Monetary Theory is a free download at archive.org here.Lars P. Syll’s BlogAxel Leijonhufvud — the road not takenLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University