Tag Archives: Economics

Sargent’s ‘Nobel prize’ winning mumbo jumbo The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided back in 2011 to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”. In an interview with Thomas Sargent in The Region, the Nobel prize winner tried to defend the kind of  “modern macro” he himself has been part of developing:...

It can be said without great controversy that no other theoretical approach in this century has ever enjoyed the same level of ubiquity throughout the social sciences as the rational choice approach enjoys today. Despite this ubiquity, the success of the approach has been very tenuous. Its advance has been accompanied by an intense debate over its relative merit. The approach has been subject to the usual criticism of blatant inaccuracy given by outsiders to any would-be...

Hyman Minsky at 100 On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hyman Minsky (1919-1996) I recommend every one to listen to BBC 4 where Duncan Weldon tries to explain in what way Hyman Minsky’s thoughts on banking and finance offer a radical challenge to mainstream economic theory. As a young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the great pleasure and privilege​ of having Hyman Minsky as a ​teacher. He was a great inspiration at the...

Nobel prize winner Thomas Sargent talking absolute unadulterated horse shit [embedded content] I especially love the way this Nobel laureate “explains” rational expectations: There are so many people out there, and it is so difficult to know how each one of them thinks about the future. So let’s just assume they think the same. Problem solved. And that absolute nonsense reasoning rendered this guy a ‘Nobel prize’ in economics! The tiny little problem that...

Sous pression depuis des années déjà, l’enseignement des SES est repris en main par l’académisme néoclassique. Utilisé comme outil pédagogique par certains enseignants, Alternatives Economiques s’est retrouvé associé aux critiques de la droite et du patronat à l’encontre de cette matière. Alternatives Economiques est né en 1980. Le magazine tire son nom de l’interpellation de Margaret Thatcher, arrivée au pouvoir en 1979 au Royaume-Uni, qui avait l’habitude de défendre sa...

La Fed e il controllo della politica monetaria Alla Casa Bianca non è piaciuta la decisione della Federal Reserve di tagliare soltanto di un quarto di punto il tasso di riferimento. Ma l’attacco furioso via Twitter cela il fatto che a Donald Trump sia piaciuto ancor meno il modo in cui Jay Powell, in conferenza stampa, ha spiegato la decisione. È un rimedio, ha detto il presidente della Fed, all’incertezza prodotta dalla politica commerciale, in particolare...

Ist Libra besser als Euro und Dollar? Notenbanker und Finanzminister sind nicht glücklich über die Ankündigung mehrerer Firmen, darunter Facebook, PayPal und Mastercard, eine eigene elektronische Währung namens Libra schaffen zu wollen … Das ist wenig überraschend, denn Libra ist nichts anderes als ein Angriff auf das Währungsmonopol des Staates … Am Montag wurden die Libra-Macher deshalb einbestellt: zum Treffen in der so verschwiegenen wie mächtigen Bank...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action The animation above comes from a cool page of causal inference animations by Nick Huntington-Klein (h/t Alex Tabarrok), which go through, step-by-step with scatterplots, how different methods work. Alex was one of many who offered helpful tips for getting through undergrad econometrics. Call for papers for the Y-Rise conference Dec 15-21 on the science of scaling promising interventions. They have research networks looking at...

I have been invited by the ISEPA’19 conference (organised by the Dicle University) to speak atheir conference. Since I could not make it due to other obligations I was asked for a video lecture. Its subject is ‘Economic Crisis and the crisis of Economics: Political Economy as a realistic and credible alternative’ Nikos Zappas did an excellent job in recording and editing the video. The link for watching the video is below: [embedded content] The abstract of the lecture is the...

Black Rock — The Wall Street Monster  [embedded content]