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Almost Record Heat In Death Valley  My niece, Erica Werner, is a reporter for the Washington Post.  She long covered heated debates in Congress over economic policy, getting on the front page a lot as during the passing of the Covid relief bill earlier this year. But then she moved to South Pasadena, CA a few months ago for family reasons and disappeared from the WaPo front page. But there she is on today’s front page and above the fold with a...

Tags: open thread

That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation, with Richard Holden. It’s reprinted over the fold. With the prospect of a lengthy lockdown looming over Sydney, the idea of “living with the virus” has resurfaced https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-great-lie-at-the-heart-of-australia-s-de-facto-covid-19-strategy-is-about-to-be-exposed-20210706-p58782.html .  NSW Health minister Brad Hazzard has raised the prospect of abandoning the lockdown and accepting that “the...

from Lars Syll Mathematics, especially through the work of David Hilbert, became increasingly conceived as a practice concerned with formulating systems comprising sets of axioms and their deductive consequences, with these systems in effect taking on a life of their own … The emergence of the axiomatic method removed at a stroke various hitherto insurmountable constraints facing those who would mathematise the discipline of economics … In particular it was no longer regarded as...

from Asad Zaman Most economists are committed to Friedman’s methodology which advocates a nominalist philosophy of science. Theories do not aim to discover hidden real structures which explain the observations. Instead, they aim to “save the appearances”: provide a good match to the observations. Although a small minority of voices has advocated a realist methodology – Bhaskar Roy, Peter Manicas, Tony Lawson, and some others – the vast majority remains unconvinced. One important reason...

from Lars Syll Paul Krugman has often been criticized by people like yours truly for getting things pretty wrong on  the economics of  John Maynard Keynes. When Krugman has responded to the critique, by himself rather gratuitously portrayed as about “What Keynes Really Meant,” the overall conclusion is — “Krugman Doesn’t Care.” Responding to a post up here on this blog, Krugman writes: Surely we don’t want to do economics via textual analysis of the masters. The questions one should ask...

Tags: open thread

Presentation at the 3rd Marx World Congress organised by the School of Marxism, Peking University, Beijing 17-18 July 2021 ABSTRACT I.I.Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value played a crucial role in the 1970s Value Debate between Marxist and neo-Ricardians as it gave inspiration and support to the Marxist argument about the social dimension of the political-economic analysis and also about the difference between Marx’s and Ricardo’s LTV. However, the subsequent self-proclaimed...

Tags: open thread

from Dean Baker Yes, it is that time of month again. As I always say, this sort of comparison is silly, since there are so many factors determining job growth that have nothing to do with the person in the White House. But, we all know that Trump and the Republicans would be touting this to the sky if the shoe were on the other foot. So, here’s the latest, the economy has created more than 3 million jobs in the first five months of the Biden administration. It lost almost 2.9 million...