Tag Archives: Economics

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Stanford Political Scientist Hakeem Jefferson hosted a great conversation with a number of scholars on race and the criminal justice system [embedded content] The readings mentioned are assembled in this Dropbox folder and thread, and the Stanford Daily summarized the conversation. A couple of points that jumped out at me were what counts as research/evidence in academic research circles (it seems common for scholars of the black...

MMT — neither modern, nor monetary Voltaire once said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was “Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”. Something similar might be said of Modern Monetary Theory … It is neither modern, nor genuinely monetary, and it is at least as much a set of policy proposals as a theory. It might be thought that “modern” refers to the fiat money world in which we have lived since major currencies broke with gold convertibility in the 1930s …...

The limits of game theory If you read Binmore’s Essays on the foundations of game theory (1990) you will find a section where he says that, unfortunately, we get into a kind of impasse. We get this infinite regress linked to the common knowledge problem. For example, I drive frequently from Aix to Marseille. You have the autoroute and parallel to it is the route nationale. Say there is, one day, congestion on the autoroute and nobody on the nationale. I...

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) makes clear that the spending of a currency-issuing government necessarily precedes tax payments and bond sales to non-government. This has important implications. It means that a currency-issuing government does not – and cannot – require revenue prior to spending. It means that it is government spending that makes possible the payment of taxes and non-government purchase of bonds, not the other way round. And it means that when a government requires...

Microfoundations — neither law nor true Simon Wren-Lewis is one of many mainstream economists that staunchly defends the idea that having microfoundations for macroeconomics moves macroeconomics forward. A couple of years ago he wrote this: I think the two most important microfoundation led innovations in macro have been intertemporal consumption and rational expectations …  [T]he adoption of rational expectations was not the result of some previous...

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Feynman’s trick (student stuff)  [embedded content] I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. [It] showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. [If] guys at...

Alberto Alesina, the prominent Harvard University economist and main architect behind the theory of ‘expansionary austerity,’ has died at age 63, Italian media reports today. RIP. As we all know there has been an obsession with government budget deficits since the crisis of 2008. Alesina’s ideas — mostly building on econometric analyses — about austerity expansion basically boils down to the hope that if you cut deficits, the confidence fairy will make business people invest....

The Beltrami identity (student stuff)  [embedded content]

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Coronavirus patient, comedian Noam Shuster, found herself at the center of an accidental social experiment profiled on the Rough Translation podcast My colleague Kate Glynn-Broderick writes today with an example of how her existing project in Bangladesh, exploring gender gaps in access to mobile money and banking is quickly pivoting to COVID-19, as Bangladesh’s government plans to use those same platforms to distribute social...