Tag Archives: Economics

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...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn by Gaby Dunn / Panoply on iTunes: I’m included in the latest episode! (the “Get Rich or Die Vlogging” one) In related news, I promise that I don’t secretly work at Starbucks. :)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I forgot that I had a bunch more videos to put together and post, so I’m trying to get that ball rolling again. (There’s a “Behavioral Economics” playlist so that you can start at the beginning if you want.)

Hur mycket ojämlikhet tål samhället? Igår kväll 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.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Maybe Working-Class Trump Voters Aren’t Racist, But They Are Comcast: I swear the analogy makes sense when you read it…

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I can’t resist appropriating a good meme.

Formalized economics bordering on the insane What guarantee is there … that economic concepts can be mapped unambiguously and subjectively – to be terribly and unnecessarily mathematical about it – into mathematical concepts? The belief in the power and necessity of formalizing economic theory mathematically has thus obliterated the distinction between cognitively perceiving and understanding concepts from different domains and mapping them into each other....

To all who argued the financial world would’ve collapsed without the bailouts: The political world is collapsing now because of the bailouts — Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) June 25, 2016 The bigger picture of the early 21st century follows: Western nations experienced a massive blowout bubble of leverage, irrational exuberance, and Hayekian pseudo-money creation. Yet this money was not going to overwhelmingly productive causes. The real output of the Western world did not follow...

The need for a new economics curriculum without the present suicidal formalism When the global economy crashed in 2008, the list of culprits was long, including dozy regulators, greedy bankers and feckless subprime borrowers. Now the dismal science itself is in the dock, with much soul-searching over why economists failed to predict the financial crisis. One of the outcomes of this debate is that economics students are demanding the reform of a curriculum...

Mathematics and statistics do not solve our disagreements Statistical Science is not really very helpful for understanding or forecasting complex evolving self-healing organic ambiguous social systems – economies, in other words. A statistician may have done the programming, but when you press a button on a computer keyboard and ask the computer to find some good patterns, better get clear a sad fact: computers do not think. They do exactly what the...