Tag Archives: Economics

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Why Hyman Minsky matters 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 time. He still is. Advertisements

Economic policy — a political matter What kind of financial system do we want? What function should it have? What kind of financial activity do we want to permit or even encourage? These are essential questions for the shaping of economic and social policy at a national and global level. If we leave these questions up to the private sector, we expose ourselves to enormous risks. On the basis of our experience of 2008, we know how to master a massive heart...

The euro — more pain, more suffering, and more unemployment The euro was supposed to bring shared prosperity, which would enhance solidarity and advance the goal of European integration. In fact, it has done just the opposite, slowing growth and sowing discord … The central problem in a currency area is how to correct exchange-rate misalignments like the one now affecting Italy. Germany’s answer is to put the burden on the weak countries already suffering...

Economics needs a new Reformation A more pluralist approach would take account of the complexity of markets, the constraints imposed by nature and rising inequality. So what needs to be done? Firstly, listen to consumers, because it is pretty obvious that they are unimpressed with what they are getting. The failure of the economics establishment to predict the crisis and its insistence that austerity is the right response to the events of a decade ago has...

The rest of the Jack Ryan pilot is 45 minutes of talking about clustering standard errors David McKenzie has a nice post and discussion on descriptive studies in development. In his back and forth with Lant in the comments he mentions the count of how many development econ studies in 14 journals in 2015 were RCTs (9.7%). Google introduced a data set search, which trawls for publicly available data sets, similarly to how Google Scholar works. Here they describe how it works and how to...

Secular stagnation and failed interpretations​ of Keynes Commenting on the Stiglitz-Summers debate on secular stagnation, Roger Farmer writes: We cannot continue to make unfounded assertions about economic policy using the failed interpretation of the General Theory that evolved from John Hicks’ attempt to reconcile Keynes with the classics. The current manifestation of that approach is so-called New Keynesian Economics, which Summers himself has rightly...

Is secular stagnation nothing but an excuse for flawed economic policies? There are many lessons to be learned as we reflect on the 2008 crisis, but the most important is that the challenge was – and remains – political, not economic: there is nothing that inherently prevents our economy from being run in a way that ensures full employment and shared prosperity. Secular stagnation was just an excuse for flawed economic policies. Unless and until the...

Discrimination in the labour market In der Forschung zu Arbeitsmarktdiskriminierung existieren zwei theoretische Ansätze, die sich mit den Ursachen für diskriminierendes Verhalten von Arbeitgebern befassen: Theorien der präferenzbasierten und der statistischen Diskriminierung. Der amerikanische Ökonom und Soziologe Gary Becker hat erstmals den Begriff der „taste-based discrimination“ eingeführt um zu beschreiben, dass sich Arbeitgeber bei ihren...

The gross substitution axiom Economics is perhaps more than any other social science model-oriented. There are many reasons for this — the history of the discipline, having ideals coming from the natural sciences (especially physics), the search for universality (explaining as much as possible with as little as possible), rigour, precision, etc. Mainstream economists want to explain social phenomena, structures and patterns, based on the assumption that the...