"But that one is holding the poop!"Adam Tooze, the author of the monumental Crashed (who was, incidentally, student of Wynne Godley, one of my mentors), wrote a piece for the London Review of Books that has received a lot of praise. While it reviews Paul Krugman's latest book, it provides an overview of the radicalization of New Keynesians, or at least some, that dominate both in academia, and in the corridors or power. The gatekeepers of knowledge and academic and intellectual influence,...
Read More »The World Health Organization warns of outbreak of virulent new ‘Economic Reality’ virus
New paper by Steve Keen. After Paul Romer accused mainstream colleagues of using phlogiston to explain phenomena they don't understand, now we have a better working hypothesis about what is happening with the mainstream. From the abstract: A new virus, known as ‘Reality’, has started to afflict Mainstream Economists, causing them to reject the ‘as if’ arguments they used to use to justify their models. There is no known cure for the virus, and complete avoidance of ‘Reality’ is the...
Read More »Bloomberg Notices Paul Romer’s Indictment of Macroeconomics
By William K. BlackNovember 21, 2016 Bloomington, MN Bloomberg has written an article about the origins of Paul Romer’s increasingly famous critique of modern macroeconomics. His intention actually had been to write a paper that would celebrate advances in the understanding of what drives economic growth. But when he sat down to write it in the months before taking over as the World Bank’s chief economist, Romer quickly found his heart wasn’t in it. The world economy wasn’t growing much...
Read More »The Trouble with Paul Romer’s Angriness
Count to 10 The paper by Paul Romer, The Trouble with Macroeconomics, has been in the news, and many bloggers have posted about it (Lars Syll here, to name one) and some of the major newspapers (for example, here and here). This follows his previous critiques on what he referred to as mathiness. It's also important since now Romer is the World Bank's chief economist. In all fairness, the only refreshing thing in the paper is the sarcasm, and the internal sociological critique of the...
Read More »