Tag Archives: Economics

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Three relatively recent additions to development Twitter worth noticing if you haven’t already, Tavneet Suri, Nava Ashraf, Seema Jayachandran. Here’s proof from just this week: There’s a new website devoted to making development research easily accessible, VoxDev.org. Editor Tavneet Suri says: Here is our vision: We want to bring cutting-edge research to the forefront of decision making – for policymakers, the private sector,...

Mainstream monetary theory — neat, plausible, and utterly wrong In modern times legal currencies are totally based on fiat. Currencies no longer have intrinsic value (as gold and silver). What gives them value is basically the legal status given to them by government and the simple fact that you have to pay your taxes with them. That also enables governments to run a kind of monopoly business where it never can run out of money. Hence spending becomes the...

President Trump, in his inaugural address and elsewhere, rightly says that over the decades since 1980 American household distributions of income and wealth became strikingly unequal. But if recent budget and legislative proposals from Trump and the House of Representatives come into effect, today’s distributional mess would become visibly worse. I will sketch how the mess happened, then I will propose some ideas about how it might be cleaned up. I will show that even with...

Förra hösten arrangerade Malmö högskola ett samtal om ekonomi och ojämlikhet i dagens Sverige. Under Cecilia Nebels kompetenta ledning samtalade serietecknaren Sara Granér, professor Tapio Salonen och yours truly om vad de växande inkomst- och förmögenhetsklyftorna gör med vårt samhälle. Ni som inte hade möjlighet vara där, kan följa samtalet här. div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements...

Leontief on the dismal state of economics Much of current academic teaching and research has been criticized for its lack of relevance, that is, of immediate practical impact … I submit that the consistently indifferent performance in practical applications is in fact a symptom of a fundamental imbalance in the present state of our discipline. The weak and all too slowly growing empirical foundation clearly cannot support the proliferating superstructure of...

Nationalekonomi — ett annat slags vetenskap En national-ekonomi, som antar, att dess föremål är en ren naturföreteelse eller blott ett tankeexperiment, är icke någon verklig national-ekonomi, utan ett annat slags vetenskap …      ‘National-ekonomien i stöpsleven,’ 1936     div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements...

I en tid när ljudrummet dränks i den kommersiella radions tyckmyckentrutade ordbajseri och fullständigt intetsägande pubertalflamsande tjafs har många av oss mer eller mindre gett upp. Radion, som en gång i tiden var en källa till både vederkvickelse och reflexion har degenererat till en postmodern ytlighetsavgud. Men det finns ljus i mörkret! I programmet Text och musik med Eric Schüldt — som sänds på söndagsförmiddagarna i P2 mellan klockan 11 och 12 — kan man lyssna på...

What is it that DSGE models — really — explain? Now it is “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” (DSGE) models inspired by the Lucas critique that have failed to predict or even explain the Great Recession of 2007–2009. More precisely, the implicit “explanations” based on these models are that the recession, including the millions of net jobs lost, was primarily due to large negative shocks to both technology and willingness to work … So can the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. It’s a puzzle why more people don’t use long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs or hormone shots. Berk Ozler reports on qualitative findings from Cameroon about why adolescent girls don’t seem interested in them. A new working paper suggests that how refugees fare economically in the U.S. is heavily dependent on at what age they arrive, perhaps because learning English is easier if they come earlier. The authors estimate...

By James Kwak A lot has been written recently about the direction of the Democratic Party. This is what I think. I have been a Democrat my entire life. Today, the Democratic Party matters more than ever because it is the only organization currently capable, at least theoretically, of preventing the Republicans from turning the United States into a fully-fledged banana republic, ruled by and for a handful of billionaire families and corporate chieftains, with a stagnant economy and...