Tag Archives: Economics

Fallacies of financial fundamentalism Fallacy 2Urging or providing incentives for individuals to try to save more is said to stimulate investment and economic growth. Again, actually the exact reverse is true. In a money economy, for most individuals a decision to try to save more means a decision to spend less; less spending by a saver means less income and less saving for the vendors and producers, and aggregate saving is not increased, but diminished as...

I programmet Ekdal och Ekdal häromkvällen fick Sveriges finansminister — Magdalena Andersson — på bästa sändningstid möjlighet förklara hur vi ska kunna minska klyftorna i Sverige. Till min — och säkert flera andras — stora förvåning verkade fru Andersson vara mest intresserad av att försöka frammåla en bild av att problemen egentligen inte är så stora eftersom socialdemokratin har hållit den ‘svenska modellen’ — för att i grunden skapa ett jämlikt samhälle — levande: 1 Alla...

Bernard Lietaer (1942 — 2019)  [embedded content] Sad news reached us today that one of our greatest monetary​ thinkers, Bernard Lietaer, has passed away. RIP.

Gary Becker — making nonsense out of economic science The econometrician Henri Theil once said “models are to be used but not to be believed.” I use the rational actor model for thinking about marginal changes but Gary Becker really believed the model. Once, at a dinner with Becker, I remarked that extreme punishment could lead to so much poverty and hatred that it could create blowback. Becker was having none of it. For every example that I raised of...

If you’ve been wondering where Chris has been, all I know is that it seems to involve a Colombian unicornGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First, congratulations to Dave Evans, everybody’s favorite public good generator, on his upcoming move to the Center for Global Development, where he’ll join an impressive bench, including Pam Jakiela, Susannah Hares, and Kristaps Porzingis. (And subscribe to his blog at that link for great book reviews, and other interesting...

Die Macht der Zahlen  [embedded content]

‘Modern’ economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In his seminal book Economics and Reality (1997), Tony Lawson traced this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject It is — sad to say — as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. It is still a fact that within mainstream economics internal validity is everything and external validity nothing. Why anyone should be...

Så återskapar vi förtroendet för nationalekonomi som vetenskap Nationalekonomin som vetenskap har världen över förlorat otroligt mycket i prestige och status under senare år. Inte minst på grund av dess oförmåga att se den senaste finansiella krisen i antågande och på grund av dess avsaknad av konstruktiva och hållbara förslag på att ta oss ur krisen. Hur återskapar vi förtroendet för nationalekonomin? Fem förändringar är helt avgörande. (1) Sluta låtsas...

(From the video at the end of the post)Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Oxfam releases a report around the same time as Davos every year on who owns what portion of global wealth. Their spin on it is designed to make headlines, but Dylan Matthews explains why it’s really hard to measure.Also in Vox, Stephanie Wykstra provides a nice plain-language summary of what the research says about microloans. A very cool very cross randomized experiment (more than 50...

Clint invites comments and critique. 1000 Castaways: Fundamentals of Economics, Economics, Macroeconomics1000 Castaways, Chapter 3: Balancing the Two Systems Clint Ballinger