Tag Archives: Economics

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...

[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....