Tag Archives: Economics

Paul Romer leaves the World Bank Outspoken chief economist Paul Romer is leaving the World Bank “effective immediately” after just 15 months on the job, the bank’s president told staff on Wednesday in an internal announcement seen by the Financial Times. Mr Romer, one of the US’s most celebrated economists, had been engaged in a running battle with staff economists at the bank almost since his high-profile arrival in October 2016. Areas of dispute have...

Wren-Lewis on internal consistency The example is the derivation of a benevolent policy maker’s preferences from the utility function of the representative consumer assumed as part of the model, a line of research initiated by Michael Woodford. Before getting on to the values point, let me note that it is a good example of the primacy of internal consistency in microfoundations rather than the Lucas critique. Before Woodford’s work, microfoundations...

RBC methodology — three decades of intellectual regress Neoclassical economics is known for its illicit use of garbled language which hides and convolutes instead of explains … An interesting example is the chapter by Edward Prescott, titled ‘RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory’ (ungated version). Let’s first give the floor to him (emphasis added), mind that ‘leisure’ means ‘measured unemployment’.: “What turned out to be the...

New Keynesian ‘tweaking’ won’t do the job Whereas the Great Depression of the 1930s produced Keynesian economics, and the stagflation of the 1970s produced Milton Friedman’s monetarism, the Great Recession has produced no similar intellectual shift. This is deeply depressing to young students of economics, who hoped for a suitably challenging response from the profession. Why has there been none? Krugman’s answer is typically ingenious: the old...

Reward work, not wealth Eighty-two​ percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today … Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Pardon our remodeling! Chris is migrating his site to new servers, our apologies for any recent downtime. FYI that we’re still getting SSL worked out so your browser might warn you the website is insecure (just offering http not https). I don’t really know what that means for a blog, but just in case, don’t put your bank account number in the comments section until it’s worked out? In the meantime I’m reposting last week’s links...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Pardon our remodeling! Chris is migrating his site to new servers, our apologies for any recent downtime. FYI that we’re still getting SSL worked out so your browser might warn you the website is insecure (just offering http not https). I don’t really know what that means for a blog, but just in case, don’t put your bank account number in the comments section until it’s worked out? In the meantime I’m reposting last week’s links...

The real flimflam man As yours truly noted the other day, Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis has been relentless in his efforts to defend orthodox macroeconomic theory against attacks from pluralist rethinking economics students and ‘heterodox’ critics like yours truly. Answering to this critique, Wren-Lewis now says he finds my view that he “obviously shares the view that there is nothing basically wrong with ‘standard’ theory” nothing but rather ‘pathetic’...