Tag Archives: Economics

Top economics influencers to follow Mainstream economics has sadly made economics increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Trying to contribute to making economics a more realistic and relevant science, yours truly launched this blog in 2011. Now, thirteen years later and with millions of page views yours truly is — together with people like e.g. Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, Thomas Piketty, and Steve Keen — ranked...

The problem with economics — too much maths, too little history .[embedded content] Mainstream economists have always wanted to use their hammer, and so have decided to pretend that the world looks like a nail. Pretending that uncertainty can be reduced to risk and that all activities, relations, processes, and events can be adequately converted to pure numbers, have only contributed to making economics irrelevant and powerless when confronting real-world...

Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and new posts don't even appear on it until they've amassed enough views to push down previous posts. It's an absurd way of organising a site. So I have decided in future to post links to my Substack posts here. Hopefully this will mean you can find them more easily, both on Google and Twitter. Some of my...

Riksbanken har gjort hundratusentals arbetslösa Många mainstreamekonomer medger att det är svårt att exakt veta var jämviktsarbetslösheten — NAIRU — ligger, men att den kan fungera som en slags ”tankeram” som kan hjälpa politiker och andra policymakare att fatta beslut och göra prognoser … Bra tankeram? Nej! Som senare tids forskning övertygande visat är NAIRU snarare att se som en slags ekonomisk-politisk fiktion som förändras utifrån den förda finans- och...

Game theory — a waste of time on a staggering scale We certainly agree that regularities or models that explain or that give heuristic value over many different cases are highly desirable. But ones that do neither are not — especially if they use up huge resources along the way. When looking at the details, the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s explanatory record so far is poor and its heuristic record mixed at best. The only way to get a reliable sense of what...

Nationalekonomi — en pseudovetenskap . . Lars Pålsson Syll, doktor i både nationalekonomi och ekonomisk historia och professor vid Malmö universitet gästar Starta pressarna för att prata om nationalekonomins brister. I stället för att studera hur världen faktiskt ser ut stirrar den sig blind på verklighetsfrånvända modeller. Han är mycket kritisk till den rådande neoklassiska doktrinen och menar att en ekonom som bara är ekonom är en dålig...

How economists invented austerity .[embedded content] To many conservative and neoliberal politicians and economists,​ there seems to be a spectre haunting the United States and Europe today — Keynesian ideas on governments pursuing policies raising effective demand and supporting employment. Some of the favourite arguments used among these Keynesophobics to fight it are the ‘doctrine of sound finance’ and the need for austerity. Is this witless crusade...

Why economic models do not explain One of the limitations of economics is the restricted possibility to perform experiments, forcing it to mainly rely on observational studies for knowledge of real-world economies. But still — the idea of performing laboratory experiments holds a firm grip on our wish to discover (causal) relationships between economic ‘variables.’If we only could isolate and manipulate variables in controlled environments, we would...

Åtstramningspolitik är inte lösningen Oavsett hur mycket förtroende du har för de ekonomisk-politiska åtgärder som förespråkas av regering och riksbank nuförtiden, kan det inte förvandla dålig åtstramningspolitik till bra jobbskapande politik.   Åtstramningsåtgärder och överdriven och enkelspårig fixering vid penningpolitiska åtgärder och inflation är inte vad som krävs för att få vår haltande ekonomi ur dess nutida dvala — och inte heller diskussioner om...

Are we all behavioural economists now? Postwar neoclassical economics was a reaction against a set of approaches based on the principles of hedonic psychology … Various developments in positive and normative economics had reassured them that references to unobservable entities were not only illegitimate but also dispensable. Thus, the concept of preference came to be the primitive notion of economic theory, and references to psychological theory were to be...