Tag Archives: Economics

Seven sins of economics There has always been some level of scepticism about the ability of economists to offer meaningful predictions and prognosis about economic and social phenomenon. That scepticism has heightened in the wake of the global financial crisis, leading to what is arguably the biggest credibility crisis the discipline has faced in the modern era. Some of the criticisms against economists are misdirected. But the major thrust of the...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Causal Friday: Some Real Effects of the Flint Water Crisis…: Depressing and a good use of data analysis tools, all in one…

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Madina Nalwanga as chess champion Phiona Mutesi in the film Queen of Katwe.Photo: Edward Echwalu/Disney Recognizing that an increasing amount of development policy is being done in developing countries, the prominent British NGO Oxfam is moving its headquarters from the UK to Nairobi. There’s some evidence that being exposed to relatable role models can improve performance in school or at work. A newly-published RCT compared the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Madina Nalwanga as chess champion Phiona Mutesi in the film Queen of Katwe.Photo: Edward Echwalu/Disney Recognizing that an increasing amount of development policy is being done in developing countries, the prominent British NGO Oxfam is moving its headquarters from the UK to Nairobi. There’s some evidence that being exposed to relatable role models can improve performance in school or at work. A newly-published RCT...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Madina Nalwanga as chess champion Phiona Mutesi in the film Queen of Katwe.Photo: Edward Echwalu/Disney Recognizing that an increasing amount of development policy is being done in developing countries, the prominent British NGO Oxfam is moving its headquarters from the UK to Nairobi. There’s some evidence that being exposed to relatable role models can improve performance in school or at work. A newly-published RCT compared the...

Game theory and the shaping of neoliberal capitalism Neoliberal subjectivity arises from the intricate pedagogy of game theory that comes to the fore in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and is interchangeable with contemporary paradigmatic instrumental rationality. Rational choice is promoted as an exhaustive science of decision making, but only by smuggling in a characteristic​ confusion​ suggesting​ that everything of value​ to agents can be reflected in...

Sooo…I have a bit of a confession to make- I’ve established a bit of a cottage industry tutoring students in the course I taught while I was in grad school. Not gonna lie, it’s pretty nice to be seen as an advocate as opposed to the thing between the student and the grade that the student wants, in part because students are more willing to admit what they find confusing to me than to their “real” instructors. As a related project, I figured it would make sense to create videos for the items...

Missing the point — the quantitative ambitions of DSGE models A typical modern approach to writing a paper in DSGE macroeconomics is as follows: o to establish “stylized facts” about the quantitative interrelationships of certain macroeconomic variables (e.g. moments of the data such as variances, autocorrelations, covariances, …) that have hitherto not been jointly explained; o to write down a DSGE model of an economy subject to a defined set of shocks...

As a related matter, never say “give me all of your money” when mugging an economist: “So, like, do you mean only M1 or do I need to hand over M2 as well? Are you only counting items officially recognized as currency or are you demanding all items that could function as money? Technically speaking, fiat money has no intrinsic value so is there any chance I can convince you that this is not worth your time?” You can also see the post on the original site here.

Dangers of ‘running with the mainstream pack’ [embedded content] An absolutely fabulous speech — and Soskice and Carlin’s textbook Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and the Financial System — that Dullien mentions at the beginning of his speech — is really a very good example of the problems you run into if you want to be ‘pluralist’ within the mainstream pack. Carlin and Soskice explicitly adapts a ‘New Keynesian’ framework including price...