Tag Archives: Economics

Claudia Goldin — gender gaps and inequality The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Indeed, Claudia’s contributions to the topic are vast, perhaps best epitomised by her 1990 book Understanding the Gender Gap. This book illustrates at once her rigor as a University of Chicago-trained PhD as...

This paper introduces the notion of monetary disorder. The underlying theory rests on a twin circuits view of the macro economy. The idea of monetary disorder has relevance for understanding the experience and consequences of the recent decade-long period of monetized large budget deficits and ultra-easy monetary policy. Current policy rests on Keynesian logic whereby […]

The purist streak in economics 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 on the...

Economic myths that just won’t die .[embedded content]

How to get a ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics — talking absolute nonsense! Many people would argue that, in this case, the inefficiency was primarily in the credit markets, not the stock market—that there was a credit bubble that inflated and ultimately burst. Eugene Fama: I don’t even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don’t know what a credit bubble...

Mainstream economics — a methodological 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; given that the...

Finding the Money follows economist Stephanie Kelton on an exploration of Modern Monetary Theory. Also appearing in the movie are Pavlina R. Tcherneva, L. Randall Wray, Mathew Forstater and Fadhel Kaboub. Soon coming to a theatre near you!

‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics — worse than useless I have tried to document how the practitioners of the self-proclaimed ‘science of monetary policy’ have gone out of their way to salvage their paradigm—after the inflationary surge of 2021-2023 made it clear that the New Keynesian emperor was not wearing any clothes. All their elaborate tools and instruments, including the output gap, the unemployment gap, the New Keynesian Phillips curve and...

Felet med modern nationalekonomi Det som är fel med mainstream nationalekonomi är inte att den använder modeller i sig, utan att den använder dåliga modeller. De är dåliga eftersom de inte bygger broar till de verkliga system där vi lever. Förhoppningsvis kommer det ensidiga, nästan religiösa, insisterandet på matematisk deduktiv modellering som den enda vetenskapliga aktiviteten värd att förfölja inom nationalekonomin att snart ge vika för metodologisk...

Mainstream (neoclassical) economics has always put a strong emphasis on the positivist conception of the discipline, characterizing economists and their views as objective, unbiased, and non-ideological … Acknowledging that ideology resides quite comfortably in our economics departments would have huge intellectual implications, both theoretical and practical. In spite (or because?) of that, the matter has never been directly subjected to empirical scrutiny. In a recent study,...