Tag Archives: Economics

For a Russian opposed to the war, and helpless to do anything about it, the horror is not that incomes will fall 10% this year, nor that unemployment will double, or that inflation will be 30%. Rather: in order to get out of this fall – not just to go to growth, but at least to restore it, you need not just make the decision “the war is over” and start negotiations on the gradual lifting of sanctions. We need to repeal dozens if not hundreds of laws passed in the last ten years. I would say...

The irrelevance of the Ramsey growth model So in what sense is this “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” model firmly grounded in the principles of economic theory? I do not want to be misunderstood. Friends have reminded me that much of the effort of “modern macro” goes into the incorporation of important deviations from the Panglossian assumptions that underlie the simplistic application of the Ramsey model to positive macroeconomics. Research focuses...

The limits to growth .[embedded content] In the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that economic growth has not only brought greater prosperity. The other side of growth, in the form of pollution, contamination, wastage of resources, and climate change, has emerged as perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. Against the mainstream theory’s view on the economy as a balanced and harmonious system, where growth and the environment go hand in...

In 2019 the age-adjusted death rate from an opioid overdose was 21.6 per 100,000 people. This compares with 12.9 for kidney disease, 14.2 from suicides, 14.7 for influenza, 21.6 from diabetes, and 161.5 from heart disease (the leading cause of death in the United States). Opioid overdose deaths place in the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States. As can been from Figure 1, prior to 2015 most of these opioid deaths arose from prescription (Rx) overdoses, but after that they came...

For many people, deductive reasoning is the mark of science: induction – in which the argument is derived from the subject matter – is the characteristic method of history or literary criticism. But this is an artificial, exaggerated distinction. Scientific progress … is frequently the result of observation that something does work, which runs far ahead of any understanding of why it works. Not within the economics profession. There, deductive reasoning based on logical...

How to make good decisions in a radically uncertain world .[embedded content] To understand real-world decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. To simply assume that...

MMT and ‘monetary crankery’ MMTists often like to position themselves as the only ones to properly understand the ‘operational realities’ of modern monetary systems. Ironically, many of the claims made by MMTists on this topic are misleading at best. One common rhetorical tactic that I’ve noticed they employ, which often catches their critics out, is to use the term ‘government’ in a way that’s different typically from how it is used in mainstream...

Stephen Marglin sur le besoin d’une nouvelle théorie économique Peut-on élaborer une nouvelle théorie économique qui permettra d’influencer les gouvernements actuels et futurs dans le sens du progrès, de la résolution des crises et de la recherche du bien-être collectif ? Oui, bien entendu, mais cela ne se fera pas en un jour. Nous devrons pour cela commencer par désapprendre les fondements de l’économie traditionnelle – le présupposé de l’individualisme,...

Förväxla inte samhällsekonomi med hushållsekonomi Det er foruroligende, at to tidligere overvismænd, såkaldte ’topøkonomer’ Torben M. Andersen og Michael Svarer uden at ryste på hånden kan konkludere først i Jyllandsposten (20. juni, 2020) og dernæst uændret i Altinget så sent som 15. januar 2021 på følgende måde: ’Mindre brug af offentlige ressourcer i dag øger muligheden for større offentligt forbrug i fremtiden, og bidrager således til også at have et...

Paul Krugman and the power of folk economics And then there’s Paul Krugman who … has stumbled on folk economics. And I’ll give him credit, since the “folk” he refers to “needn’t be members of the working class. They can be, and often are, members of the elite: plutocrats, powerful politicians and influential pundits.” Absolutely! … But then he reverts to classic Krugman: mainstream economists get it mostly right, and all they really need is the “IS-LM...