Tag Archives: Economics

John Maynard Keynes — life, ideas, legacy .[embedded content]

Att tjäna pengar på sjuka — en riktigt sjuk idé Personal på Attendos äldreboende Långbroberg i södra Stockholm har larmat om missförhållanden – utan att de känner att de får gehör hos cheferna. Ett tiotal anställda väljer nu att berätta om: ■ Obemannade avdelningar nattetid, där boende skriker av smärta och det dröjer innan de får hjälp. ■ Blaskig soppa, frysta måltider och ont om frukost, vilket gör att brukare är hungriga och rasar i vikt. ■ Boende som...

Seven lessons we need to learn from the pandemic .[embedded content]

Yours truly on The Top Economics Blogs list Mainstream economics has sadly made economics increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Trying to contribute in making economics a more realist and relevant science, yours truly launched this blog in March 2011. Now, ten years later and with millions of page views on it, yours truly is — together with people like e.g. Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman — ranked on INOMICS’ The Top Economics Blogs...

Causal inference from observational data Researchers often determine the individual’s contemporary IQ or IQ earlier in life, socioeconomic status of the family of origin, living circumstances when the individual was a child, number of siblings, whether the family had a library card, educational attainment of the individual, and other variables, and put all of them into a multiple-regression equation predicting adult socioeconomic status or income or social...

Elizabeth Warren roasting top bank CEOs .[embedded content] That’s the right spirit, senator! Watching Warren give these baloney talking guys a well-earned lecture on public decency is absolutely fabulous.

Why economic models do not explain Analogue-economy models may picture Galilean thought experiments or they may describe credible worlds. In either case we have a problem in taking lessons from the model to the world. The problem is the venerable one of unrealistic assumptions, exacerbated in economics by the fact that the paucity of economic principles with serious empirical content makes it difficult to do without detailed structural assumptions. But the...

Testing causal explanations in economics Third, explanations fail by question (3.1) [“are the factors cited as possible causes of an event in fact aspects of the situation in which that event occurred?”] where the factors invoked as possible causes are idealisations. No doubt this claim will be considered contentious by some economists, accustomed as they are to explanations based on such dramatic assumptions as rational expectations, single-agent...

Functional finance and Ricardian equivalence According to Abba Lerner, the purpose of public debt is “to achieve a rate of interest which results in the most desirable level of investment.” He also maintained that an application of Functional finance will have a tendency to balance the budget in the long run: Finally, there is no reason for assuming that, as a result of the continued application of Functional Finance to maintain full employment, the...

Vad man ser och hedrar Jan Myrdal var i Paris just då och ville likna August Strindberg så till den grad att han tog in på hotell Orfila och bodde i det rum där hans idol en gång bott. Själv ville jag inte likna Jan Myrdal. Stig ‘Slas’ Claesson