Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The latest massive $1.1bn profit reported by Coles will doubtless produce a new round of hand-wringing about the “cost of living”. Governments will produce initiatives aimed at capping or reducing prices. Pundits will use a variety of measures to argue as to whether such measures are inflationary. Then there will be debates about whether splitting up Coles and Woolworths into smaller chains would enhance competition. And the Reserve Bank will be encouraged to push even harder to return...

from Lars Syll According to Keynes, financial crises are a recurring feature of our economy and are linked to its fundamental financial instability: It is of the nature of organised investment markets, under the influence of purchasers largely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market sentiment than with a reasonable estimate of the future yield of capital-assets, that, when disillusion falls upon an...

This is a second hand story about my brother in law’s experience in a Giant (TM) Supermarket checkout line (I guess he should guest post this). He saw someone checking out wearing a Trump Shirt and started a conversation (he’s like that) mentioning that he was voting for Harris. The Trump supporter said that BIden and Harris had accomplished nothing. When my brother in law (politely I’m sure) noted that he disagreed. The Trump supporters (plural...

Americans hate high prices, and Kamala Harris says she plans to combat them by banning price gouging in food and groceries. But, depending on what form it takes, economists could hate her plan. Vice President Harris, who will formally accept her party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, has laid the blame for high food prices at the feet of businesses. Surveys conducted by Harvard University economist Stefanie...

from Peter Radford When you are only concerned with one thing and have only one tool things can go awry quite easily.  So it is with our price theory friends.  They bask in the rigor of their thinking and look askance at the inability of regular folks to grasp the point of the logic of their so-called price mechanism — note the mechanical nature of it all.  The recent spate of snooty commentary aimed at Kamala Harris and her ideas about price gouging are a case in point.  I talked about...

The mining magnate does away with the constraints of arithmetic, simultaneously demanding lower taxes more public spending and lower deficits From The Guardian A striking feature of the age of billionaires in which we now live is that billionaires are more and more inclined to give us the benefit of their opinions. In the past year alone, we’ve had Marc Andreessen’s retro-futurist “Techno-optimist manifesto”, Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncements on the future of media, and, most...

from Lars Syll At a first glance, DSGE models seem to imply total ignorance because representative agents (or representative groups of agents with limited heterogeneity) featuring objective utility functions populate the literature. At a second glance, however, it becomes obvious that “methodological individualism” prevails and even dominates. To understand this dominance one only has to once again note that the representative agent has fixed properties only within any given model, or...

Forecast of commercial healthcare costs to come in 2025 (MedCity report), what has occurred in the past, and what is expected beyond 2025. Meanwhile Congress is twiddling their thumbs arguing amongst themselves over what is more important to their existence . . . constituents or big business. Interesting too, how the Sadlers are getting themselves off the hook for the Opioid epidemic. They didn’t know? New Survey, employers’ project trending...

from Peter Radford Price-gouging is now a topic in politics.  Kamala Harris has put it there.  Naturally there has been the predictable outcry of opposition coupled with and equally predictable sneer of disapproval: how could she say something so uneducated?  Has she no grasp of Econ.101?  Oh the illiteracy! Perhaps even more predictable is that someone like John Cochrane has felt it necessary to write an article in praise of price-gouging.  After all, hard core libertarian economists are...

from Asad Zaman and current issue of RWER Our current environmental predicament is fundamentally a crisis of knowledge, rooted in the Enlightenment’s narrow conceptualization of epistemology. This shift fostered an illusion of objectivity that has since permeated our understanding of the world, particularly in the context of societal dynamics. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on objective knowledge marginalized the subjective realms of emotional intelligence, moral intuition, and diverse...