Tag Archives: Economics

How to tame inflation .[embedded content]

Regeringen och Riksbanken hanterar inflationen fel Vad beror den ökande inflationen på? Max Jerneck (MJ): Den beror till stor del på ökade priser på energi och livsmedel, som orsakas av saker som hur elmarknaden är reglerad och torka samt kriget i Ukraina. Även priserna på möbler och andra varor, och grundläggande komponenter och insatsvaror som halvledare och stål spelar in. Under pandemin minskade efterfrågan på tjänster samtidigt som den snabbt ökade...

The Law of Demand Mainstream economics is usually considered to be very ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise.’ And yes, indeed, it’s certainly full of ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ statements like “the state of the economy will remain the same as long as it doesn’t change.” Although ‘true,’ this is, however — like most other analytical statements — neither particularly interesting nor informative. As is well known, the law of demand is usually tagged with a clause that...

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Mainstream economics — the art of building fantasy worlds Mainstream macroeconomic models standardly assume things like rational expectations, Walrasian market clearing, unique equilibria, time invariance, linear separability and homogeneity of both inputs/outputs and technology, infinitely lived intertemporally optimizing representative household/ consumer/producer agents with homothetic and identical preferences, etc., etc. At the same time, the models...

Evidence-based economics — the fundamentals Many economists still think that “evidence” is only of one kind, i.e. statistical/econometric analysis. Whilst this is important, it is not enough on its own. One reason for its privileged position may be that it is typically contrasted with “anecdotal evidence”, which is unreliable. But the truth is richer than that. It is true that basing one’s thinking about the economy on one or more stories carries the danger...

The Fed is making a big mistake .[embedded content]

In 1817 David Ricardo presented — in Principles — a theory that was meant to explain why countries trade and, based on the concept of opportunity cost, how the pattern of export and import is ruled by countries exporting goods in which they have a comparative advantage and importing goods in which they have a comparative disadvantage. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, however, didn’t explain why the comparative advantage was the way it was. At the beginning of the...

Mainstream economics — a methodological reductionist strait-jacket. Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense;...

How banks create money .[embedded content]