Tag Archives: Economics

Was MMT right about inflation? Yes! .[embedded content]

Brownian motion (student stuff) .[embedded content] In case you know some Python you could try this little code snippet and this is the plot you get:

Keynes — en ständigt aktuell inspiration I veckans avsnitt av Starta Pressarna diskuterar yours truly tillsammans med Max Jerneck och Daniel Suhonen varför John Maynard Keynes räknas som 1900-talets kanske främste nationalekonom och hur vi kan vi använda hans idéer för att finna lösningar på dagens samhällsekonomiska problem.

The total incompetence of people in charge of the US economy .[embedded content] Absolutely gobsmacking! Jared Bernstein — the chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers — obviously needs some good advice about the way monetary systems work. Here’s a book he could start his educational tour with:

Ergodicity — a questionable assumption (wonkish) .[embedded content] Paul Samuelson once famously claimed that the ‘ergodic hypothesis’ is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume — as Samuelson and most other mainstream economists — that ergodicity is essential to economics? Sometimes ergodicity is mistaken for stationarity. But although all ergodic processes are stationary,...

I veckans avsnitt av Starta Pressarna  fortsätter debatten om det finanspolitiska ramverket och behovet av stora framtida investeringar i infrastruktur, bostäder, försvar och energiomställning. Medverkande i det här avsnittet är — förutom Daniel Suhonen — bland annat Lars Calmfors, Elinor Odeberg och Max Jerneck. Som alltid på den här podden — intressant, slagkraftigt och tankeväckande!

Economics — a dismal and harmful science .[embedded content] It’s hard not to agree with DeMartino’s critique of mainstream economics — an unethical, irresponsible, and harmful kind of science where models and procedures become ends in themselves, without consideration of their lack of explanatory value as regards real-world phenomena. Many mainstream economists working in the field of economic theory think that their task is to give us analytical truths....

The non-existence of economic laws In mainstream economics, there’s — still — a lot of talk about ‘economic laws.’ The crux of these laws — and regularities — that allegedly exist in economics, is that they only hold ceteris paribus. That fundamentally means that these laws/regularities only hold when the right conditions are at hand to give rise to them. Unfortunately, from an empirical point of view, those conditions are only at hand in artificially...

No sooner had I finished my comment on the irrelevancy of economics but I had confirmation — albeit unwittingly — in this morning’s Financial Times.  There on the editorial page was a short column by Soumaya Keynes talking about the rise of Hank. For those of you not on the cutting edge, “Hank” stands for Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian, as in a complicated model of the economy. Hank is a whole new way of looking at model economies, with the really big breakthrough being...

Tourism — a critical perspective It may be noted in passing that essentially the same process, in which participation in an activity changes its form, occurs in tourism … The fact that some tourists are not in search of something different does not remove the anomaly. For if the increased activity of tourists at large deprives only one of their number of a satisfaction previously available, orthodox economic analysis provides no basis for judging the...