Tag Archives: Economics

[embedded content] Yours truly och en del andra nationalekonomer — de som fortfarande har lite kontakt med verkligheten — har under ett par års tid nu frågat sig varför vi i det här landet har en regering som inte vågar satsa på en offensiv finanspolitik och låna mer. Inte minst mot bakgrund av de historiskt låga räntorna är det ett gyllene tillfälle att satsa på investeringar inom infrastruktur, vård, skola och välfärd. Den ­svenska utlandsskulden är historiskt låg. Den...

Mainstream economics — a case of Bourbaki perversion Il y a une certaine tendance française à attribuer à l’utilisation des mathématiques les difficultés des modèles à expliquer les phénomènes économiques … Pour moi, le problème ne réside pas dans l’utilisation des méthodes formelles mais plutôt dans une obsession poussant à améliorer et même à perfectionner des modèles qui semblent être totalement détachés de la réalité. Comme Robert Solow l’a observé:...

I förra veckan var yours truly inbjuden att i Roskilde opponera på  Mogens Ove Madsens Ph.D avhandling Tidsaspekter i Keynesiansk teori. Låt mig här därför ta tillfället i akt och ge några synpunkter på den med framgång försvarade avhandlingen. Ett ofta diskuterat problem (för många uppfattat som en paradox) inom Keynesforskningen handlar om dennes till synes statiska framställningssätt i General Theory. Enligt Madsen är det av avgörande betydelse förstå att det för Keynes när...

Trying to synthesize Marx and Keynes  [embedded content]

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It’s complicated, trust me, see below.Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Two Blattman-related things, for researchers and aspiring researchers:IPA’s Peace and Recovery program is accepting research proposals, on topics such as war, peace, electoral violence, state-sponsored violence, terrorism, forced displacement, natural disasters, and recovery from all the above.They fund: “full randomized trials, pilot studies, exploratory and descriptive work, travel grants,...

Game theory — a scientific cul-de-sac  [embedded content] Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision-making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is...

We can either let theory guide us in our attempt to estimate causal relationships from data … or we don’t let theory guide us. If we let theory guide us, our causal inferences will be ‘incredible’ because our theoretical knowledge is itself not certain … If we do not let theory guide us, we have no good reason to believe that our causal conclusions are true either of the experimental population or of other populations because we have no understanding of the mechanisms that are...

Robert Lucas coming out as a closet Keynesian In his Keynote Address to the 2003 History of Political Economy Conference, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas said: Well, I’m not here to tell people in this group about the history of monetary thought. I guess I’m here as a kind of witness from a vanished culture, the heyday of Keynesian economics. It’s like historians rushing to interview the last former slaves before they died, or the last of the people who...

Where economics went wrong David Colander and Craig Freedman’s Where Economics Went Wrong is a provocative book designed to inspire economists to serious reflection on the nature of economics and how it is practiced. It is a book to that seeks to stimulate discussion about the current state of the discipline; it should be read by anyone who categorizes what they do as applied policy work. I agree with much – though not all – of what Colander and Freedman’s...