Tag Archives: Economics

The ultimate takedown of teflon coated defenders of rational expectations James Heckman, winner of the “Nobel Prize” in economics (2000), did an interview with John Cassidy in 2010. It’s an interesting read (Cassidy’s words in italics): What about the rational-expectations hypothesis, the other big theory associated with modern Chicago? How does that stack up now? I could tell you a story about my friend and colleague Milton Friedman. In the...

Economics is a discipline with the avowed ambition to produce theory for the real world. But it fails in this ambition, Lars Pålsson Syll asserts in Chapter 12, at least as far as the dominant mainstream neoclassical economic theory is concerned. Overly confident in deductivistic Euclidian methodology, neoclassical economic theory lines up series of mathematical models that display elaborate internal consistency but lack clear counterparts in the real world. Such models are at...

Below are the slides from my presentation at Beyond Covid on 12th June. The whole webinar can ve viewed here.The pandemic seems to me to resemble the "nuclear disaster" scenarios of my youth: hide in the bunker, then creep out when the immediate danger is over, only to find a world that is still dangerous and has fundamentally changed in unforeseeable ways. Rabbits hiding from a hawk is perhaps a kinder image, though hawks don't usually leave devastation in their wake. And I like rabbits. So...

Below are the slides from my presentation at Beyond Covid on 12th June. The whole webinar can ve viewed here.The pandemic seems to me to resemble the "nuclear disaster" scenarios of my youth: hide in the bunker, then creep out when the immediate danger is over, only to find a world that is still dangerous and has fundamentally changed in unforeseeable ways. Rabbits hiding from a hawk is perhaps a kinder image, though hawks don't usually leave devastation in their wake. And I like rabbits. So...

Solving differential equations (student stuff)  [embedded content]

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Professor Lisa Cook explains that black and white inventors put in equivalent numbers of patent applications once in 1899, and never again.  First, a great webinar by Professor Lisa Cook, former economic advisor to President Obama, among many other accomplishments, on how lynchings, violence, and discrimination caused African-American inventions (measured by patent applications) to peak in 1899 and never recover. Here’s the video...

Is the U.S. in recession? If so, when did the recession start, and what caused it? The usual economic definition of "recession" is two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. But in Q1 2020, growth was positive, though it was apparently slowing sharply (more on this shortly):So using the standard economic definition, the U.S. is not yet in recession.But according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), the U.S. entered recession in...

Is the U.S. in recession? If so, when did the recession start, and what caused it? The usual economic definition of "recession" is two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. But in Q1 2020, growth was positive, though it was apparently slowing sharply (more on this shortly):So using the standard economic definition, the U.S. is not yet in recession.But according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), the U.S. entered recession in...

MMT — Keynesianism with an expansionary twist Expansionary policy with a strong redistributive component is an attractive proposal … Higher output and real wages would likely stimulate productivity growth. Global warming can and should be attacked seriously. With regard to foundation myths for MMT, Chartalism adds little to the observation that a modern macro economy operates on the basis of fiat money supported by state power which transcends enforcing the...

What’s the use of economics? The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has — or should — the teaching of economics be modified in the light of the current economic crisis? The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for over two centuries? For macroeconomists in particular, the reaction has...