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from Blair Fix Over the last year, I’ve watched with horror and amusement as health agencies around the world flip-flopped their advice on how to deal with COVID. My horror comes from knowing this flip-flopping breeds mistrust in science. But I am (morbidly) amused because I know that uncertainty is a basic part of real research. For the public, ‘science’ tends to mean authoritative knowledge. But for researchers, ‘science’ is an iterative process, filled with wrong turns, new evidence,...

… It depends on how you frame the question That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation . The key idea, drawn from behavioral economics and psychology is that of framing, developed by Kahneman and Tversky. More to come on this soon … Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Mark Weisbrot Labor Day is a good time to reflect upon how American workers have been doing — especially the majority who have been left behind for most of the past 40 years. From 1979 to 2018, the median wage has grown by just 11.6 percent. If we compare this to prior decades, e.g., 1948 to 1979, that increase was 93.2 percent. These two facts tell a big part of the story of a social transformation that is both inexcusable and historically unusual: a high-income country becoming...

from Richard Parker and current issue of RWER Let me now try to connect this little synoptic “longue duree” to the present and to the matter before us: neoliberalism and what might succeed it. We live in the early 21st century and the conventional economics we’ve inherited has now arrived at a moment when once-novel Victorian-era ideas seem not just inadequate but irrelevant. A similar moment seemed, to many, to have arrived before, back in the 1930s. But apostles of marginalism such as...

In our last post we saw that private sector indices for used car prices and for rent prices were highly predictive of future changes in the corresponding CPI component indices. The next logical step is obvious: we should use this information to build an aggregate CPI index that factors in this forward-looking information to get a prediction of inflation over the next six months. In all honesty, I was a little reticent to do this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is a...

With a federal election taking place in Canada in fewer than three weeks, I’ve written a 950-word overview of the Liberal Party’s housing platform. It’s available here: https://nickfalvo.ca/ten-things-to-know-about-the-liberal-partys-housing-platform/ Nick Falvo is a Calgary-based research consultant with a PhD in Public Policy. He has academic affiliation at both Carleton University and Case Western Reserve University, and is Section Editor of the Canadian Review of...

from Lars Syll Submission to observed or experimental data is the golden rule which dominates any scientific discipline. Any theory whatever, if it is not verified by empirical evidence, has no scientific value and should be rejected. Maurice Allais Formalistic deductive ‘Glasperlenspiel’ can be very impressive and seductive. But in the realm of science it ought to be considered of little or no value to simply make claims about models and lose sight of reality. Mainstream economics has...

This paper explores the economics and political economy of financialization using Matt Taibbi’s vampire squid metaphor to characterize it. The paper makes five innovations. First, it focuses on the mechanics of the “vampire squid” process whereby financialization rotates through the economy loading sector balance sheets with debt. Second, it identifies the critical role of government […]

from Norbert Häring Thales, one of the largest international defense contractors, calls the digital vaccination passport a precursor to universal mobile-digital identity credentials. Thales thus confirms my analysis and my worst fears. Under the headline “How digital ID can help citizens access government services from anywhere,” Kristel Teyras, in charge of the defense contractor Thales’ Digital Identity Services portfolio, writes: “So-called digital ‘vaccination passports’ will play a...