Tag Archives: Economics

On models and simplicity When it comes to modelling yours truly does see the point emphatically made time after time by e. g. Paul Krugman about simplicity — at least as long as it doesn’t impinge on our truth-seeking. ‘Simple’ macroeconomic models may of course be an informative heuristic tool for research. But if practitioners of modern macroeconomics do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the simplicity...

Macroeconomics and the Friedman-Savage ‘as if’ logic An objection to the hypothesis just presented that is likely to be raised by many … is that it conflicts with the way human beings actually behave and choose. … Is it not patently unrealistic to suppose that individuals … base their decision on the size of the expected utility? While entirely natural and under- standable, this objection is not strictly relevant … The hypothesis asserts rather that, in...

This Fall (October/November 2022) marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE). The founding co-editors were Louis-Philippe Rochon, Matias Vernengo, and I. At the beginning of 2018 Louis-Philippe Rochon stepped down to become sole editor of the Review of Political Economy and he was replaced by Esteban Pérez Caldentey. […]

What’s the use of economics? The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has — or should — the teaching of economics be modified … The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for over two centuries? For macroeconomists in particular, the reaction has been to suggest that modifications of...

Ecological economist Herman Daly has passed away at the age of 84. Together with economists such as Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, he was one of the founding fathers of ecological economics. R.I.P.

Leontief and the sorry state of economics Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions … Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic...

Some economists seem to be überjoyed by the fact that they are using the same ‘language’ as real business cycles macroeconomists and that they therefore somehow can learn something from them. James Tobin obviously did not find any need to speak the RBC ‘language’: 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...

The Nobel prize in economics — awarding popular misconceptions This year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel honours Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. In the view of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the laureates ‘have significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy’. But what is the role of banks in the economy? The academy describes it this way: ‘To understand why a...

At the Battle of Ideas last Saturday, a panel on "populism" spent an hour and a half discussing everything except economics. Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph called for the Tory party to replace what she called a "twisted morality of sacrifice and dependency" with the "Judaeo-Christian" values of thrift and personal responsibility. And when a brave audience member asked "shouldn't we be discussing economics?" Tom Slater of Spiked brushed him off and carried on talking about cultural issues....

55 Tufton Street and the people who crashed the British economy .[embedded content]