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I plan to write my own thoughts on this topic soon, but I’d be interested to read yours. Usual rules apply. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll For many people, deductive reasoning is the mark of science: induction – in which the argument is derived from the subject matter – is the characteristic method of history or literary criticism. But this is an artificial, exaggerated distinction. Scientific progress … is frequently the result of observation that something does work, which runs far ahead of any understanding of why it works. Not within the economics profession. There, deductive reasoning based on logical...

Before the invasion of Ukraine, there was a clear consensus on the limitations of economic sanctions. They would take a long time to organize and even longer to have any effect. Just about every commentary I read anticipated Russian tanks in Kiev long before sanctions could have any effect. That judgement now looks way off the mark. Despite some limited advances in the south of Ukraine, Putin’s invasion seems to have stalled. Meanwhile sanctions, both official and unofficial, have...

from Peter Radford I am still stuck wondering about Diane Coyle’s defense of economics. Heraclitus exists only in fragments.  That’s unfortunate because aphorisms are not the best way to tackle the hubris of the technocrat.  He was on to something though.  We all know his well-worn saying about stepping into rivers.  He tells us that they’re never the same twice.  And yet they stay the same.  Beware, then, the analyst that thinks she sees a regularity in our economy.  It may look the...

from Dean Baker From my Twitter feed it seems that Sarah Palin has been resurrected. All sorts of centrist-liberal types are yelling “drill baby, drill!” as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have been pushing for ignoring environmental regulations and even directly subsidizing fracking. While that is no doubt music to the ears of the fossil fuel industry, this is going backwards about as quickly as we can in our effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is an...

Egypt is alarmed. And rightly so. A war in one of the grain baskets of the world, Ukraine, will affect us all but Egypt, and Turkey, will be hit even harder than many other countries. And they know it. According to Reuters, “Egypt, often the world’s top wheat importer, is working on a plan to buy wheat from other regions rather than Russia and Ukraine … “There are 14 approved countries Egypt could import wheat from, some of which are outside Europe” … Russia...

According to Our World in Data, as of February 25, 2022, cumulative COVID deaths per million in the United States were 14 times higher than in Australia and 259 times higher than in New Zealand.  Most of this difference was undoubtedly due to the border controls and internal lockdowns these countries used to keep COVID cases at very low levels for the past two years.  A crude comparison based on cumulative death rates suggests that these policies...

With the pace of events accelerating all the time, yesterday’s hot take is today’s embarrassing blunder, to be forgotten as soon as possible. Still, so far this suggested way out of the Ukraine disaster doesn’t look too bad to me. By explicitly raising the threat of nuclear war, Putin has reminded everyone that any outcome has to look better to him than fighting on. At the same time, in every other respect, things look worse and worse for him. There have been no easy...