Tag Archives: Economics

Economists do not understand the economy  [embedded content]

One of the best Indian dairy cooperative-based Nobel pun cartoons you’ll see all day. Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action That is Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo above, thanks to Neela Saldanha and Elizabeth Koshy for explaining that Abi Jit means “(He) just won” or “won now,” so it means “just won the Nobel.” And that the dairy cooperative Amul is known in India for their punny billboards (which you can also find on their twitter feed).On the Nobel sugar high,...

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!  [embedded content] In the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that economic growth has not only brought greater prosperity. The other side of growth, in the form of pollution, contamination, wastage of resources, and climate change, has emerged as perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. Against the mainstream theory’s view on the economy as a balanced and harmonious system, where...

A truly distinguished economist who knows what he is talking about  [embedded content]

‘Nobel prize’ winners Duflo and Banerjee do not tackle the real root causes of poverty Some go so far as to insist that development interventions should be subjected to the same kind of randomised control trials used in medicine, with “treatment” groups assessed against control groups. Such trials are being rolled out to evaluate the impact of a wide variety of projects – everything from water purification tablets to microcredit schemes, financial literacy...

The experimental approach to global poverty  [embedded content]

‘Nobel prize’ winner Esther Duflo on how to fight poverty  [embedded content] Today The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2019 to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. Great choice! In one single stroke the academy doubled the number of women having received the ‘Nobel prize’ in economics. Compared with most other recipients for...

On the limited applicability of game theory Many mainstream economists – still — think that game theory is useful and can be applied to real-life and give important and interesting results. That, however, is a rather unsubstantiated view. What game theory does is, strictly seen, nothing more than investigating the logic of behaviour among non-existant robot-imitations of humans. Knowing how those ‘rational fools’ play games do not help us to decide and act...

Ethiopian Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards peace with Eritrea, though the committee acknowledged it’s still a work in progress. Ethiopia has also loosened some of its more repressive policies around security and journalism recently. Commentary from BBC starting around 6 minutes here (both stories h/t Laura Seay).For longer...

At least since the time of Keynes’s famous critique of Tinbergen’s econometric methods, those of us in the social science community who have been impolite enough to dare to question the preferred methods and models applied in quantitative research in general and economics more specifically, are as a rule met with disapproval. Although people seem to get very agitated and upset by the critique — just read the commentaries on this blog if you don’t believe me — defenders of...