Tag Archives: Economics

August is the latest addition to the Syll-Meyer family. Four days today. And yes — Strindberg is one of our favourite writers … div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Why Do People Hate “Price Gouging” So Much? Economists, Take Note…: At least I chose a good image for my article this time. =P

Prisuppgången på bostäder i Stockholm de senaste 20 åren är unik i världen … Nu har fastighetsprofessorn Hans Lind och stockholmaren Fredrik B Nilsson skrivit boken “Att förstå bostadsmarknaden genom historien om den ofrivillige bostads-karriäristen” … I boken resonerar Hans Lind, som är professor i bygg- och fastighets-ekonomi, utifrån forskning och vetenskapliga teorier kring Stockholms bostadsmarknads historia, vilka mekanismer som drivit den och vad som kommer att ske...

Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis — so wrong, so wrong Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) says that people’s consumption isn’t affected by short-term fluctuations in incomes since people only spend more money when they think that their life-time incomes change. Believing Friedman is right, mainstream economists have for decades argued that Keynesian fiscal policies therefore are ineffectual. As shown over and over again for the...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I feel like this is something that most social scientists can relate to… (See more on economistsdoitwithmodels.com.)

The government budget deficits obsession The obsession with government budget deficits since the crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession illustrates the damage done by mistaken economic ideas. In the rich West, tens of millions of people lost jobs that could have been saved … The media focused on the politics of the budget debate, but economic ideas had a central role in the outcome. Believers in Say’s law predominated … The most prominent research was...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]For the (Probably Not) Last Time, the DREAMers Are Not Taking Your Jobs: I believe that a lot of well meaning people genuinely think this, and they deserve an explanation as to why they are wrong rather than just getting yelled at on humanitarian grounds.

So what do I mean by methodological arrogance? I mean an attitude that invokes micro-foundations as a methodological principle — philosophical reductionism in Popper’s terminology — while dismissing non-microfounded macromodels as unscientific. To be sure, the progress of science may enable us to reformulate (and perhaps improve) explanations of certain higher-level phenomena by expressing those relationships in terms of lower-level concepts. That is what Popper calls...

Earlier this summer, four economists released a working paper suggesting that part of the decline in male labor-force participation can be attributed to the increased quality of video games. You can see an article about it here, and you can also see a non-technical summary of the paper as part of the NBER digest.Conceptually at least, this makes sense- better leisure activities increase the opportunity cost of working, which decreases the net benefit of working, and generally we do less of...

So I’m not entirely clear on what The Onion is making fun of here, but I have a couple hypotheses: 1. (more obvious) If polls are to be believed, the economy immediately improved once Trump got elected. Yes, this seems absurd if taken literally, but I guess this is what the concept of “animal spirits” is supposed to be all about. If enough people believe that Trump will be good for the economy and act accordingly, it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it still doesn’t happen...