Tag Archives: Economics

A memorable evening with Joan Robinson After dinner – by now I had had a couple of glasses – I decided I had to make something of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to engage with one of my heroes.  Joan … was in the armchair again, and I sat down on the floor facing her at her feet.  I began by asking her what it was like being a student at Cambridge back in the Twenties.  After recalling the lectures of the literary critic I. A. Richards, she moved on to...

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INET conferencing​ beyond disappointment I’m sitting in a coffee shop opposite Haymarket Station in Edinburgh. Just up the road, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is holding its conference. I’m supposed to be there, as I was yesterday and the day before. But I am not at all sure I want to go. The last two days have left a very bitter taste. This conference, grandly entitled “Reawakening”, is supposed to be a showcase for the “new economic...

Welcome to the very first (and possibly last) “Don’t Understand, Don’t Even Want To F___ing Understand Modern Money” post, otherwise known as a DUDE WTF UMM… post. This is for those of us who have no desire to consider economics at even an elementary level but who are tired of others exploiting our indifference and blasé attitude for their own dubious ends. Just because we don’t know diddly-squat about economics and are proud of it, this should not disadvantage us in life. What we need are...

I'm sitting in a coffee shop opposite Haymarket Station in Edinburgh. Just up the road, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is holding its conference. I'm supposed to be there, as I was yesterday and the day before. But I am not at all sure I want to go. The last two days have left a very bitter taste.This conference, grandly entitled "Reawakening", is supposed to be a showcase for the "new economic thinking" of INET's name. I hoped to hear new voices and exciting ideas. At...

When Marx’s theory of value is interpreted in a simultaneist way, it is relatively easy to calculate the ‘monetary expression of labor time’ (or MELT). It is simply new value added, measured in monetary terms, divided by productive employment. If it were not for the ‘productive’/’unproductive’ distinction, the simultaneist MELT could readily be calculated from the National Accounts as the ratio of Net Domestic Product at current prices to Total Employment. Retaining the...

‘Laws of economics’ — a fictional cage Increasingly, our debates about — and our solutions to — pressing issues such as immigration, budgets and debt are framed in the context of all-powerful economic laws that dictate what is and is not possible. There’s just one slight problem: There are no laws of economics. Referencing “the laws of economics” as a way to refute arguments or criticize ideas has the patina of clarity and certainty. The reality is that...

Do unrealistic economic models explain real-world phenomena? When applying deductivist thinking to economics, neoclassical economists usually set up ‘as if’ models based on a set of tight axiomatic assumptions from which consistent and precise inferences are made. The beauty of this procedure is, of course, that if the axiomatic premises are true, the conclusions necessarily follow. The snag is that if the models are to be relevant, we also have to argue...

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Why economists can’t predict the future  [embedded content] Economic predictions and forecasts have little value. They usually amount to nothing more than intelligent guessing. Making forecasts and predictions obviously isn’t a trivial or costless activity, so why then go on with it? The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really underlines how important it is for social sciences to incorporate Keynes’s far-reaching and...