The 18th World Association of Political Economy Forum (WAPE) will be held in Istanbul (August 6-8, 2025). The Call for Papers can be found here: https://wapeweb.org/ The Marxist Macroeconomic Modelling workgroup has issued a special CfP for a stream in the forum. The CfP follows Workgroup for Marxist Macroeconomic Modelling Call for Papers for the 18th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy ‘Multipolarity in the 21st Century: Challenges and...
Read More »The pretence-of-knowledge syndrome
from Lars Syll What does concern me about my discipline, however, is that its current core — by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach — has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one … The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium strategy is so attractive, and even plain addictive, because it allows one to generate...
Read More »Crypto and Donald Trump’s strategic baseball card reserve
from Dean Baker The Republicans and Donald Trump seem set on establishing a strategic crypto reserve. They are claiming this will somehow be an important source of economic security for the country. It’s clear that establishing the reserve will be an important way to give tens of billions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign contributors, but it is much harder to see how it will provide any economic security to the country. To better understand the logic of a strategic crypto reserve, it...
Read More »How economists forgot the real world
from Lars Syll The book’s argument is that in straining to peer through the chaos and confusion of the world to the underlying mechanisms, too much economic thinking, both in Ricardo’s day and ours, mistook a small, unrepresentative sample as the whole picture. This has distorted the vision of generations. If your scientific ideal is a simple, logical model, there is a tendency to focus on those parts of reality that are more regular or can be easily counted. The awkward aspects more...
Read More »Tariffs and Consumer Prices Insights
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Both Joel and New Deal democrat had commentaries on Angry Bear about Real GDP. Economist Claudia Sahm had an evaluation piece on the impact of the Federal Government labor reduction to the economy. No recession according to her analysis and just economic uncertainty. New Deal democrat suggests we should take the Atlanta Fed’s NowCast negative […] The post Tariffs and Consumer Prices Insights appeared first on Angry Bear.
Read More »My Father’s Disgust
from Peter Radford I am in a grim and introspective mood this morning. I have been reflecting on how my father might react to where we are. He was one of those who fought against fascism. His life was shortened by being wounded during that fight. As a result, I never knew him as a healthy person. What, I wonder, would he make of America’s turn away from democracy and towards autocracy? What would he make of the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources as payment for so-called “aid” given...
Read More »The elites’ big lie on inequality
from Dean Baker (I saw that Jeff Bezos wants the Washington Post’s editorial page to run pieces touting the merits of free markets. Here’s my submission.) There are not many issues on which there is largely bipartisan agreement, so the story we tell about the origin of economic inequality stands out. Both sides agree that the increase in inequality of income and wealth is driven by an unfettered market. The difference is that conservatives say it is wise to accept the outcomes of the...
Read More »What Will Result from Not Having a CFPB
[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession. The CFPB in creation was an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve. Its creation was meant to write and enforces rules for financial institutions, examine both bank and non-bank […] The post What Will Result from Not Having a CFPB appeared first on...
Read More »Is Neoliberalism still the dominant economic paradigm in the West today? – S.Mavroudeas
Till today there is a widespread presumption that Neoliberalism (NL) is the dominant political-economic paradigm in the West but also in the greater part of the world. This paper argues that this is not so and that since the beginning of the 21st century NL has fallen from grace and has been replaced by the equally conservative New Keynesianism (NK) with the New Macroeconomic Consensus (NMC). The fundamental sign of this transition is the widespread and growing state economic...
Read More »Best advice to an aspiring economist — don’t be an economist!
from Lars Syll A science that fails to reflect on its own history and neglects critical methodological and theoretical questions about its practice is a science in crisis. As early as 1991, a commission led by Anne Krueger—featuring esteemed economists such as Kenneth Arrow, Edward Leamer, and Joseph Stiglitz—highlighted a fundamental weakness in graduate economics education. Drawing from their own experiences, they observed an alarming disconnect between theoretical and econometric...
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