Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll In her interesting Pufendorf lectures Nancy Cartwright presents a theory of evidence and explains why randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are not at all the “gold standard” that it has lately often been portrayed as. As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog (e.g. here and here), RCTs usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which its advocates portray it, cannot hide the fact that...

from The Guardian discrimination by date of birth Many economic assessments of the climate crisis “grossly undervalue the lives of young people and future generations”, Prof Nicholas Stern warned on Tuesday, before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. Economists have failed to take account of the “immense risks and potential loss of life” that could occur as a result of the climate crisis, he said, as well as badly underestimating the speed at which the costs of clean technologies, such...

… but the real decisions on Australia’s emissions are happening elsewhere. That’s the title of my latest piece in The Conversation. Key paras The Morrison government, partly through its own doing, has almost no control over Australia’s emissions trajectory. The real decisions on that are being made elsewhere – by state governments and civil society, or outside the country altogether.Morrison’s last-minute reach for a 2050 net-zero target is almost entirely symbolic, as was the...

from Lars Syll Last Friday, November 9, saw the big “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding Fathers of neoliberal/libertarian  free-market ideology … One episode in Milton Friedman’s career not celebrated (or even acknowledged) at last week’s centennial took place in 1946, the same year Friedman began peddling his pro-business “free market economics”...

from Dean Baker That simple point might have been worth mentioning in an article reporting on efforts by Democrats to rein in prescription drug costs since 1989. The current level of spending of roughly $500 billion a year comes to more than $1,500 for every person in the country. Annual spending on prescription drugs is roughly one and a half times as much as the proposed spending in President Biden’s Build Back Better proposal. It’s also worth noting that this piece repeatedly refers to...

A lot of discussion around “living with Covid” starts from the premise that, as long as vaccination rates are high (say 80 per cent of the population), we don’t need to worry about high case numbers. That’s because vaccinated people are less likely to suffer bad outcomes (hospitalization and death). The problem with this claim is that, because the primary function of vaccines is to protect against infection, unvaccinated people will be over-represented among cases. Let’s try some...

from Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson   We are now ready to approach the question of how these national monetary orders of capitalism relate to one another internationally. One key contradiction has powered the history of world money under capitalism. On the one hand, money is created by states or those delegated and controlled by them. On the other, there can be no world state under capitalism, and thus no world money. When dominant states nevertheless seek to foist their currency on...

Suppose that you believe, as I do, that the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump and his Republican enablers and imitators is by far the most important issue confronting us today.  One implication of this view is that opinion leaders – politicians, pundits, academics, journalists – should make every effort to forestall disaster by educating people about the risk of democratic backsliding, and trying to bring people together to preserve...