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from Katharine Farrell    If economics is indeed concerned with how humankind goes about sustaining its own life, day to day, then representing that complexity must be built into the ontology of economic models.  Adjustments to variables, parameters and reference data can all contribute to improving models, but they do not necessarily address the ontological limitation that, in the original liberal theory “representation, [read that of Jevons and Walras] the economic process neither...

from James Galbraith Economics is a policy discipline. It is engaged with the problems, large and small, of social organization and the general good. As such it co-evolves with circumstances. It is historically contingent. The application of economic ideas to specific problems under specific circumstances may succeed or fail, and in the latter case, people with different ideas normally rise to prominence. Capitalism is an economic system whose characteristics and problems have preoccupied...

Every week my e-mail box receives a steady stream of articles aimed at cultivating public animus to Russia. The articles are always wrapped in a narrative in which Russia is a threat to democracy in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The effect is to create public support for hardline action (economic and/or military) against Russia. […]

While I reconsider what I should write about, I’m also thinking about when to get a Covid booster shot. I had planned to do so in February, six months after my second AZ shot. But now, I’m thinking I should wait until the vaccines have been updated for Omicron, maybe in March. The question I need to assess is how rapidly, if at all, case numbers will grow in Queensland once borders are reopened. So far, it seems clear that Queensland has R < 1, though not so clear why. A...

from Peter Radford Brian Arthur tells us that technology most often advances in the form of domain shifts.  In his narrative technologies cluster in related groups he calls domains.  So individual technologies might advance through a tweak here or there, but the economy advances through a shift from one cluster of technologies to another. I like this idea.  Especially when we then broaden the topic to use technology as a background against which we view a particular slice of history....

My latest newsletter is here Opening para Labor has finally released its climate policy, which is just ambitious enough to differentiate it from Morrison’s do-nothingism. Apart from that, and process issues like the introduction of a federal version of ICAC, it seems unlikely that there will be any significant policy differences between the parties at the forthcoming election. Labor’s support for high-income tax cuts and budget “repair” means any spending initiatives will be...

I finished this article just as the Morrison government announced it was abandoning its proposal for voter ID laws. So, it ran with some hasty rewriting. Might be useful if the issue resurfaces. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

This graph shows how in the USA the share of total net worth held by the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles has decline drastically in the last two decades. https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/07/11/americas-middle-class-drastically-shrinks

from Lars Syll Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics … The implicit premise of the book is that interventions that work in one place can be expected to work in another. This presumes not only that the results of such “micro” interventions are substantially independent of the “macro” context, but also that a focus on such interventions, as opposed to those which reshape...