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from Emmanuelle Bénicourt, Sophie Jallais and Camille Noûs and RWER #98 The case of distribution of revenue Marginal product is a key concept of neo-classical economics, for, in the perfect competition model, it determines inputs’ demands (the quantities chosen by a competitive profit-maximizing firm are such that the value of the input’s marginal product equals the input’s real price). It is then a core concept of neoclassical distribution theory, the so-called ‘marginal productivity...

A fun and often useful way of getting perspective on events from what seems like the relatively recent past is to take the time interval between those events and the present, then count back an equal time into the past [1]. For example, The Beatles first big hit, Love me Do, came out 60 years ago, in 1962. Going back 60 years to 1902, the hits of that year included Scott Joplin’s ragtime number The Entertainer. The recent buzz around Get Back can be compared to the revival of...

In tax we trust. To our fellow millionaires and billionaires, If you’re participating in  the World Economic Forum’s ‘online Davos’ this January , you’re going to be joining an exclusive group of people looking for an answer to the question behind this year’s theme, ‘how do we work together and restore trust?’ You’re not going to find the answer in a private forum, surrounded by other millionaires and billionaires and the world’s most powerful people. If you’re paying attention, you’ll...

by New Deal democrat Short term economic forecast through mid year 2022 My short-term forecast for the first half of this year is up at Seeking Alpha. This forecast is based on the same system I have successfully used since before the Great Recession. Most forecasters, deliberately or not, cherry pick data points to fit a previously arrived at an intellectual point of view, and simply project the current trend ahead (or else default to...

from Lars Syll and WEA Commentaries Macroeconomists seem to me the biggest offenders n not taking such empirical issues (of practical data handling) seriously enough. This might sound like sheer contrarianism given that macroeconomists are constantly wielding data; after all, their business is analysing the behaviour of the whole economy and forecasting its future path. My concerns are, first, that too few think about the vast uncertainty associated with the statistics they download and...

from Lars Syll A couple of weeks ago yours truly had a review of Diane Coyle’s Cogs and Monsters in WEA Commentaires. As I wrote, there’s a lot in the book to like, but unfortunately also some things very hard to swallow. James Galbraith seems to argue along the same lines in his Project Syndicate review: Coyle subscribes to the grand illusion that price adjustment is the economy’s prime mover. But as the Cambridge Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor noted in his slim 1985 book, Economics...

from Thomas Palley Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Richard Clarida has shot himself in the foot with what appears to be insider trading. That comes on the heels of prior concerns about inappropriate trading by regional Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren. Albeit unintentionally, the good news is these indiscretions may have done working families a favor by helping disprove the notion of central bank independence. For years, many of us have argued that central bank...

Preamble. Living in the US and writing honestly about US-Russia relations (and China too) is very difficult. That is because the US is the aggressor, but Russia is an authoritarian country. That split is used by the US establishment to shuffle discussion away from US aggression on to Russian authoritarianism. Side-by-side, anyone calling the US […]

from Lars Syll A view yours truly often encounters when debating MMT is that there is an inflationary bias in MMT and that its framework ignores expectations. It is extremely difficult to recognize that description. Given its roots in the writings of Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, it is — to say the least — rather amazing to attribute that view to MMT. Let me just quote one source to show how ill-founded the critique is on this issue: MMT recommends a different approach to the federal...