Tag Archives: Economics

La discipline économique et le mirage de la ‘vraie science’ Le mirage de la « vraie science », dont la puissance fantasmatique est immense chez les économistes, met sur la voie d’une autre catégorie canguilhemienne, qui permet peut-être de donner sa qualification la plus précise à la situation épistémologique de l’économie : il s’agit de la catégorie « d’idéologie scientifique » … La catégorie d’idéologie scientifique est d’abord purement interne au...

We welcome Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman’s contribution and the debate it has inspired. We share much of their agenda for an economics “beyond neoliberalism” … Nonetheless, we believe that Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman do not go far enough in their calls for reform. The vision they paint is still focused on the discipline of economics and anchored in the core ideas of neoclassical theory that dominated the field in the twentieth century … The behavioral economics critique of the...

Hur ska man bedöma statsunderskottens utträngningseffekter i en penningekonomi, det vill säga i en modellvärld där staten [lånar pengar] i form av avistainlåning hos bankerna? … När centralbanken ger staten ett lån får staten till att börja med en inlåning hos centralbanken. Eftersom staten använder inlåningen för betalningar till icke-banker uppstår tillgodohavanden hos affärsbankerna … I gengäld ökar affärsbankernas reserver hos centralbanken. Därmed ökar alltså även...

Economics as a propaganda device The most serious deficiency of implicit formal theories is that the verbal language disguises the abstractness of the theory … The consequence of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is that the theory looks too convincing to its proponents​ … He becomes​ the prisoner of his own logical model and is rendered incapable​ of seeing reality from any other standpoint … The most widespread example is provided by the neoclassical...

Det är i dag viktigare än någonsin att ompröva de senaste decenniernas finanspolitiska passivitet och för våra samhällen ofta kostsamma återhållsamhet. Förvisso har The New York Times rätt när de proklamerade häromdagen att det tycks som om ”alla blir socialister i en pandemi”. När krisen väl är framme tenderar de flesta, från höger till vänster, att förlita sig på statliga och offentliga lösningar. Den privata marknaden är inget att hålla i handen under en kris. Även...

Die nächste Krise — sind wir bereit?  [embedded content]

Are we all behavioural economists now? Postwar neoclassical economics was a reaction against a set of approaches based on the principles of hedonic psychology … Various developments in positive and normative economics had reassured them that references to unobservable entities were not only illegitimate but also dispensable. Thus, the concept of preference came to be the primitive notion of economic theory, and references to psychological theory were to be...

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Keynes vs the Stockholm School approach to economics The Stockholm method seems to me exactly the right way to explain business-cycle downturns … But the “problem” with the Stockholm method was that it was open-ended. It could offer only “a wide variety” of “model sequences,” without specifying a determinate solution. It was just this gap in the Stockholm approach that Keynes was able to fill. He provided a determinate equilibrium, “the limit to which the...

The Keynes/Hicks macro theory — the nonexistence of a New Keynesian unicorn Paul Krugman has on numerous occasions tried to defend “the whole enterprise of Keynes/Hicks macroeconomic theory” and especially his own somewhat idiosyncratic version of IS-LM. The main problem, however, is that there is no such thing as a Keynes/Hicks macroeconomic theory! So, let us get some things straight. There is nothing in the post-General Theory writings of Keynes that...