Tag Archives: Economics

Why IS-LM doesn’t capture Keynes’ approach to the economy Suppose workers are unemployed. As a result, although willing to work even at lower wages, they are unable to buy consumption goods. As a result, firms are unable to sell those goods if they produced them. So they do not employ the workers who, as a consequence, do not have the wages to buy the consumption goods. The economy is caught in a vicious cycle of deficient demand. According to the IS/LM...

Endogenous growth theory — a crash course  

Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity of human ensembles. Many scientists agree that ergodicity is one of the most important concepts in statistics. So, what is it? Suppose you are concerned with determining what the most visited parks in a city are. One idea is to take a momentary snapshot: to see how many people are...

Mainstream economics — sacrificing realism at the altar of mathematical purity Economists are too detached from the real world and have failed to learn from the financial crisis, insisting on using mathematical models which do not reflect reality, according to the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane. The public has lost faith in economists since the credit crunch, he said, but the profession has failed to thoroughly re-examine its failings to...

The rebel who blew up macroeconomics Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience. Or infuriate countless colleagues. It just sort of happened … The upshot was “The Trouble With Macroeconomics,” a scathing critique that landed among Romer’s peers like a grenade. In a time of febrile politics, with anti-establishment revolts breaking out everywhere, faith in economists was already ebbing: They got blamed...

‘Post-real’ macroeconomics — three decades of intellectual regress Macroeconomists got comfortable with the idea that fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates are caused by imaginary shocks, instead of actions that people take, after Kydland and Prescott (1982) launched the real business cycle (RBC) model … In response to the observation that the shocks are imaginary, a standard defence invokes Milton Friedman’s (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed...

Public debt should not be zero. Ever! Nation states borrow to provide public capital: For example, rail networks, road systems, airports and bridges. These are examples of large expenditure items that are more efficiently provided by government than by private companies. The benefits of public capital expenditures are enjoyed not only by the current generation of people, who must sacrifice consumption to pay for them, but also by future generations who will...

Follies and fallacies of Chicago economics Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John...

Is Dani Rodrik really a pluralist? Unlearning economics has a well-written and interesting review of Dani Rodrik’s book Economics Rules up on Pieria. Although the reviewer thinks there is much in the book to like and appreciate, there are also things he strongly objects to. Such as Rodrik’s stance on the issue of pluralism: If Rodrik is at his strongest when discussing particular neoclassical models and their applications, he’s at his weakest when...

Economics — an academic discipline gone badly wrong Three economics graduates have savaged the way the subject is taught at many universities. Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins are all, they write in The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, “of the generation that came of age in the maelstrom of the 2008 global financial crisis” and embarked on economics degrees at the University of Manchester in 2011 precisely in order to...