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by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 29 – December 3 at Seeking Alpha My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. After a long time of very few if any weekly changes among the indicators, there were three changes this week, and several other indicators that are close to changing as well. Or, as the title to this week’s post says, there are “changes afoot.” As usual, not only will clicking over and reading bring...

from Dean Baker The development of the new variant, which was first discovered in South Africa, can be attributed to our failure to open-source our vaccines and freely transfer technology, contrary to claims from the pharmaceutical industry and its political allies. Their big talking point is that South Africa currently has more vaccines than it can effectively use at the moment. This claim ignores two important points. The first is that we really don’t know where this strain originated....

from Asad Zaman A previous post Quotes Critical of Economics collected assorted quotes which are useful in writing up different kinds of critiques of economics. In addition, I collected quotes from Romer’s Trouble With Macro which are sharply critical of economics. In terms of the “Loyalty, Voice, Exit” paradigm, I look for “Exit” quotes, which suggest that we need to throw out the entire discipline and rebuild on new foundations; for a proposed alternative, see “Uloom-ul-Umran: An...

Labor’s commitment to a 2030 target of reducing emissions by 43 per cent is a pleasant surprise. I expected 35 per cent and was confident it wouldn’t be more than 40. In essence, the 43 per cent target a restatement of the goal taken to the 2019 election. The difference is within the margin of measurement error and appears to reflect the need not to reannounce a policy that had previously been abandoned. The commitment is a surprise because it follows a series of announcements...

from Lukas Bäuerle and PNLE The most powerful and at the same time dangerous aspect of neoliberal thought is its conception of economic reality as governed by a separate sphere of absolute truths. In aligning with a long-standing tradition of perennial philosophies (lat. perennis: constant, lasting), neoliberalism has set out to reconfigure our world according to an image that was dead from the very outset. The myth neoliberalism is operating on philosophically is the idea of a world...

from Gerald Holtham (originally a comment) Radford’s points are true but the microfoundations movement in macroeconomics is guilty of greater intellectual crimes than merely attempted reductionism. It is not as if the foundations are built on extensive empirical study of the decision-making elements in an economy. We have a representative consumer who behaves according to the axioms of rational choice under conditions of certainty equivalence. Similarly there is a representative firm...

“Slow Boring” is Matthew Yglesias’s substack. I don’t subscribe. It’s about the money. I can afford it, but I don’t like the fact that Matthew Yglesias makes so much money. I am extremely envious. I admit it. I think this is a very very common problem. Many people have asked Matthew Yglesias how he makes people so angry. I guess that they too are jealous. Also the text “Slow Boring” is brilliant snark. It is a reference to Weber saying...

from Lars Syll Anyone who accepts the Neoclassical definition of ‘rational’ has, to some significant degree, lost touch with reality. So, I was expecting an ‘irrational’ reaction from this young zealot to my talk … He tried to engage me in further debate after the session, and shouted ‘But we have to make some simplifying assumptions!’ at me as I left the seminar room. My riposte, cast over my receding shoulder, was ‘Mate, you have to learn the difference between a simplifying assumption...

“tlon Uqbar orbus tertius” is an excellent story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, he imagines a world in which all that exists are minds and ideas. He refers to the assertion that we live in such a world made by the Reverand George Berkeley. In Borges’s wonderful Obis Tertius, objects can be multiplied if someone leaves it somewhere, someone else takes it away without the knowledge of the first person, so the first person finds a copy of it (called...