Tag Archives: Economics

What’s the point of all science? The point of all science, indeed all learning and reflection, is to change and develop our understandings and reduce illusion. This is not just an external and contingent sociological condition of learning but its constitutive force, which not only drives it but shapes its form. Without this universal necessary condition, none of the particular methodological and ethical norms of science and learning in general has any...

Jürgen Habermas and Hans Albert on the weaknesses of mainstream economics The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris...

Nationalekonomin har under de senaste femtio åren kommit att i allt högre grad innebära ett granskande av världen genom “matematikens järngaller”. Precis som Bertrand Russell har många ekonomer hoppats på att med tiden konstruera “en matematik för mänskligt beteende som är lika exakt som matematiken för maskiner.” För ekonomerna har detta ofta kommit att innebära att om ett fenomen inte låter sig passas in i gallret så avvisas det som falskt. Och tyvärr har trivialitet och...

Dumb and Dumber — the Chicago economics version Some years ago, in a lecture on the US recession, Robert Lucas gave an outline of what the New Classical school of macroeconomics today thinks on the latest downturns in the US economy and its future prospects. Lucas shows that real US GDP has grown at an average yearly rate of 3 per cent since 1870, with one big dip during the Depression of the 1930s and a big — but more minor — dip in the recent recession....

Yanis Varoufakis on the irrelevance of mainstream economics .[embedded content] Varoufakis is undoubtedly right — there is indeed something about the way mainstream economists construct their models that obviously doesn’t sit right. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only...

Windfall tax on oil companies .[embedded content]

How to battle inflation .[embedded content]

Economics and the law of the hammer .[embedded content] As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream economics — really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science. My own take on the issue is that economics — and especially mainstream economics — has lost immensely...

Should we save capitalism? .[embedded content]

The trickle down scam The empirical literature on the impact of corporate taxes on economic growth reaches ambiguous conclusions: corporate tax cuts increase, reduce, or do not significantly affect growth. We apply meta-regression methods to a novel data set with 441 estimates from 42 primary studies. There is evidence for publication selectivity in favour of reporting growth-enhancing effects of corporate tax cuts. Correcting for this bias, we cannot...