Tag Archives: Economics

[unable to retrieve full-text content]but what if I want my specials to have intrinsic value…

Peter Praet's speech at the Money, Macro and Finance conference last week was a goldmine. I've already discussed the central bank credibility problem revealed by his final slide. But his presentation went far, far wider than central banks. It raised serious questions about the future of the global economy.This slide - the first in his presentation - shows that there have been three significant global shocks in the last decade, not one: The first, obviously, is the deep global recession...

Thaler and behavioural economics — some critical perspectives Although discounting empirical evidence cannot be the right way to solve economic issues, there are still, in my opinion, a couple of weighty reasons why we perhaps shouldn’t be too excited about the so-called ’empirical revolution’ in economics. Behavioural experiments and laboratory research face the same basic problem as theoretical models — they are built on often rather artificial conditions...

Keynes — the first behavioural economist To-day, in many parts of the world, it is the serious embarrassment of the banks which is the cause of our gravest concern … [The banks] stand between the real borrower and the real lender. They have given their guarantee to the real lender; and this guarantee is only good if the money value of the asset belonging to the real borrower is worth the money which has been advanced on it. It is for this reason that a...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]So How Should We Feel About NDAs? Economics Can Answer That!: Don’t ever tell me that economics doesn’t have real-world applications…

The video below is of a three-part presentation by Bill Mitchell, L. Randall Wray and Martin Watts concerning their forthcoming MMT textbook. Throughout the presentation and in the Q&A session that follows there are interesting observations on the current state of university economics and prospects for MMT and the economics discipline in general. The presentation was given at the First International Conference on Modern Monetary Theory held from September 21-24, 2017 at the University...

Nobel Committee making a colossal fool of itself In its ‘scientific background’ description on the 2017 ‘Nobel prize’ in economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences writes (emphasis added): In order to build useful models, economists make simplifying assumptions. A common and fruitful simplification is to assume that agents are perfectly rational. This simplification has enabled economists to build powerful models to analyze a multitude of different...

What is behavioural economics? [embedded content] Great lecture! Yours truly especially appreciates Thaler’s excursion into the history of economics, forcefully showing the amazing extent to which mainstream economics suffers from severe amnesia. And trying to save it as e. g. Paul Krugman, arguing that rationality “in some parts of economics … seems to be a bit of a noble lie, useful as a guide for thinking as long as you keep your tongue firmly in your...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Econ Nobel Announcement, AKA I FINALLY CALLED IT FOR ONCE…: It’s the one day where everyone is talking about what I teach- just let me have this, ok? =P

Richard Thaler gets the 2017 ‘Nobel prize’ Today The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it  has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2017 to Richard Thaler. A good choice for once! To yours truly Thaler’s main contribution has been to show that one of the main building blocks of modern mainstream economics — expected utility theory — is fundamentally wrong. If a friend of yours...