Tag Archives: Economics

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]

Charles Kindleberger v. Bernanke In the papers of economist Charles Kindleberger, Perry Mehrling has found some interesting notes on the paper that won Ben Bernanke his ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics this year: Dear Dr. Bernanke, Thank you for sending me your paper on the great depression. You ask for comments, and I assume this is not merely ceremonial. I am afraid you will not in fact welcome them. I think you have provided a most ingenious solution to a...

Evidence-based policy — a façade of precision The façade of precision … is perhaps the most important in debunking SABER (the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results initiative), GEEAP (the World Bank’s and UK Aid’s new Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel), and other attempts to make evidence-based policy. To assess quantitatively the impact of an intervention, there are two ways to rule out confounding variables – statistical...

‘Nobelpriset’ i ekonomi haltar betänkligt Sveriges Riksbanks pris till Alfred Nobels minne delas i år av tre framstående amerikanska ekonomer. Pristagarna Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond och Philip Dybvig, får priset för sina studier som belyser bankernas och banksystemets roll … Trions forskningsresultat och prestationer är världsberömda … och i denna kommentar finns det inte något behov eller avsikt att förringa de prisbelönta forskarna eller deras...

Neoliberalism is a political economic philosophy that consists of two claims, one economic and the other political. The economic claim is free market laissez-faire economies are the best way to organize economic activity as they generate efficient outcomes that maximize well-being. The political claim is free market economic arrangements promote individual liberty. This paper argues […]