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from Dean Baker I get to say this about the drug companies, now that President Biden has said that Facebook is killing people because it was allowing people to use its system to spread lies about the vaccines. There is actually a better case against the drug companies. After all, they are using their government-granted patent monopolies, and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines, to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world. As a result, most...

We all get things wrong from time to time, particularly in relation to fast moving events like the pandemic. So, how can you respond when this happens. Here’s a list of possibilities, generally from best to worst in terms of intellectually responsibility and from least to most common in terms of frequency Admit error, look at why you were wrong, try and do better next time (let’s get real, we are talking about human beings here. this almost never happensGo quiet for a while, and...

from Lars Syll There is first of all the central question of methodology — the logic of applying the method of multiple correlation to unanalysed economic material, which we know to be non-homogeneous through time. If we are dealing with the action of numerically measurable, independent forces, adequately analysed so that we were dealing with independent atomic factors and between them completely comprehensive, acting with fluctuating relative strength on material constant and homogeneous...

That’s the title of my latest piece in Inside Story , also printed in the Canberra Times under the headline Sydney’s coronavirus outbreak highlights hard choices“” Key para Poor understanding of uncertainty was evident in the rush to label New South Wales as the gold standard and assume that a handful of successes was evidence that there was nothing to worry about. This conclusion didn’t take account of the fact that the policy could not afford even one failure. All high-risk...

from Ken Zimmerman  (originally a comment) On the one side were those who believed that the existing economic system is in the long run self-adjusting, though with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes … These economists did not, of course, believe that the system is automatic or immediately self-adjusting, but they did maintain that it has an inherent tendency towards self-adjustment, if it is not interfered with, and if the action...

from Gerald Holtham  (originally a comment) The biggest problem, it seems to me, is not the tools that economists use but the failure to start from real, concrete questions and issues in the real world. Someone builds a model of a real situation. It may be useful or not but if it is ingenious it gets published. People then play tunes on the model; they seek to “generalise” it in various ways. We embark on a process of theoretical development for its own sake, increasingly divorced from...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 5 – 9 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. To the surprise of many, interest rates have gone down in the past few weeks, to the point where they have resumed being a positive in my long leading model. Meanwhile, as the “delta wave” of COVID builds in the unvaccinated States, once again the pandemic will begin to assert control over the economy, at least as to...

from C. P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh International observers still view Asia and particularly East Asia as the most dynamic economic region in the world, a perception that has been even more entrenched over the period of the pandemic. Certainly, if aggregate GDP growth rates in real terms (as shown in Figure 1) are anything to go by, there is no doubt that the region of East Asia has been growing faster than the world as a whole, and has even managed to maintain positive growth in the...