Tag Archives: Economics

This is cute because it makes the process seem kind of badass, but here’s the thing- the WSJ has to be, well, the WSJ, so this description is both accurate and completely misleading. As such, allow me to provide my less sanitized but more representative account: Yes, there is a big economics conference- the annual meeting of the “Allied Social Sciences Association,” which is the parent organization of the American Economic Association- held the first weekend in January each year,...

The true nature of saving An act of individual saving means — so to speak — a decision not to have dinner to-day. But it does not necessitate a decision to have dinner or to buy a pair of boots a week hence or a year hence or to consume any specified thing at any specified date. Thus it depresses the business of preparing to-day’s dinner without stimulating the business of making ready for some future act of consumption. It is not a substitution of future...

Rational expectations — knowing what you see can’t be there …  [embedded content]

Top 10 RCT critiques •Basu, Kaushik (2014) Randomisation, Causality and the Role of Reasoned Intuition •Cartwright, Nancy  (2010) What are randomised controlled trials good for? •Cartwright, Nancy & Hardie, Jeremy (2012) Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better •Deaton, Angus (2009 ) Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development •Deaton, Angus &...

James Tobin explains why real business cycle theory and microfounded DSGE models are such a waste of time — thirty years before Paul Romer. Maybe one should start teaching some history of economic thought at economics departments again? Just a thought … They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia...

The best economics article of 2016 The best economics article of 2016 in my opinion was Paul Romer’s extremely well-written and brave frontal attack on the theories that has put macroeconomics on a path of ‘intellectual regress’ for three decades now: 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...

This is a book about human limitations and the difficulty of gaining true insight into the world around us. There is, in truth, no way of separating these two things from one other. To try to discuss economics without understanding the difficulty applying it to the real world is to consign oneself to dealing with pure makings of our imaginations. Much of economics at the time of writing is of this sort, although it is unclear such modes of thought should be called ‘economics’...

For-profit schools — a total disaster To make education more like a private good, [voucher advocates] tried to change the conditions of both supply and demand. On the demand side, the central proposal was that of education ‘vouchers’, put forward most notably by Nobel Prizewinning economist at the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman. The idea was that, rather than funding schools, government should provide funding directly parents in the form of vouchers...

New study shows marginal productivity theory has only a ‘negligible’ link to reality The correlation between high executive pay and good performance is “negligible”, a new academic study has found, providing reformers with fresh evidence that a shake-up of Britain’s corporate remuneration systems is overdue. Although big company bosses enjoyed pay rises of more than 80 per cent in a decade, performance as measured by economic returns on invested capital...

Murray Rothbard on Adam Smith Adam Smith (1723-90) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. The mystery is the enormous and unprecedented gap between Smith’s exalted reputation and the reality of his dubious contribution to economic thought … The problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics. The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong; that, even in an age that had fewer...