Tag Archives: Economics

On ergodicity and epistemological vs. ontological uncertainty A couple of years ago yours truly had a discussion on the real-world economics review blog with Paul Davidson on ergodicity and the differences between Knight and Keynes re uncertainty. It all started with me commenting on Davidson’s article Is economics a science? Should economics be rigorous? : LPS: Davidson’s article is a nice piece – but ergodicity is a difficult concept that many students of...

Covid-19 — comme le disait Keynes, nous ne savons tout simplement pas! La pandémie bouscule les économistes. Sauront-ils nous aider à appréhender l’incertitude de notre avenir collectif ? La question plonge ses racines dans des débats anciens sur la possibilité même de penser un futur incertain … Il y a exactement un siècle, en 1921, l’économiste américain Frank Knight (1885-1972) pose les fondements analytiques des théories économiques contemporaines de...

Comment l’Allemagne est devenue keynésienne En quelques semaines, l’Allemagne, championne des excédents budgétaires, est devenue keynésienne … Comment expliquer un revirement si radical ? D’abord par la nature particulière de la crise due au Covid-19. Dans cette pandémie, à la différence de la crise de l’euro, il n’y a pas de « fautif », pas d’incurie politique ou bancaire à corriger … Tous les responsables politiques du pays se sont rendus à l’évidence :...

David Graeber In Memoriam . [embedded content] Depuis le début de la pandémie, ses travaux opposant les « boulots à la con »(« bullshit jobs ») aux métiers du soin (le « care »), sous-payés alors qu’indispensables à nos sociétés, ont une résonance particulière avec l’actualité. David Graeber, anthropologue et anarchiste américain, est mort mercredi 2 septembre à Venise, en Italie … Il avait 59 ans. Auteur de plusieurs ouvrages reconnus, il était l’un des...

What the euro is all about There are still some economists and politicians out there who think that the euro is the only future for Europe. However, there seem to be some rather basic facts about optimal currency areas that it would perhaps be wise to consider … The idea that the euro has “failed” is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do. That progenitor...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Planet Money’s new resource for educators pairs podcast episodes with lesson plans, cataloged by topic. It’s a big week for findings from cash studies including: publication of Chris’s study with Fiala and Martinez showing cash benefitted Ugandan participants, but by 9 years later the control group had caught up; Universal Basic Income in Kenya buffered against hard times when COVID and the agricultural lean season hit...

In L. J. Savage’s seminal The Foundations of Satistics the reader is invited to tackle the problem of an uncertain future using the concept of ‘lottery tickets’ and the principle of ‘look before you leap.’ Carried to its logical extreme, the ‘Look before you leap’ principle demands that one envisage every conceivable policy for the government of his whole life (at least from now on) in its most minute details, in the light of the vast number of unknown states of the world, and...

The pseudo-scientific use of small-world models in a large world Radical uncertainty arises when we know something, but not enough to enable us to act with confidence. And that is a situation we all too frequently encounter … The language and mathematics of probability is a compelling way of analysing games of chance. And similar models have proved useful in some branches of physics. Probabilities can also be used to describe overall mortality risk just as...

As every mainstream textbook on growth theory, most mainstream economists choose to turn a blind eye to the concept of capital and the Cambridge controversy over it and pretend it’s much fuss about nothing. But they are wrong! The production function has been a powerful instrument of miseducation. The student of economic theory is taught to write Q = f(L, K) where L is a quantity of labor, K a quantity of capital and Q a rate of output of commodities. He is instructed...

The ‘global saving glut’ fable The structure of the US economy began to shift markedly 40 or 50 years ago … Foreign trade was part of this transformation. On the world stage Japan, Germany, and more recently, China exported far more than they import, creating gluts of traded goods and services. They accordingly built up stocks of “saving” which took the form of newly acquired liabilities (bonds and even money) from the rest of the world. For the USA, the...