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That’s the title for my latest piece in Independent Australia. Read there, comment here and there. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

That’s the title of my latest piece in Crikey. As their paywall is down, I’ll let you read it there. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll If contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry, then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject-matter concerns … Where the ultimate aim of research is not prediction per se but rather causal explanation, an idea of causation that is expressed in terms of predictive power — as, for example, ‘Granger’ causation — is likely to be...

from Asad Zaman and RWER issue 85 The methodology and ideology of modern economics are built into the frameworks of educational methods, and absorbed by students without any explicit discussion. In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects. Positivism uses clever arguments to make you deny what you feel in your bones...

from Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan For much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, U.S. unemployment and incarceration went hand in hand. This is how the rulers disciplined their subjects. But during the Great Depression and Great Recession, the link broke, if only temporarily. The following figure shows these patterns. Part of the rational for this two-pronged discipline is illustrated in the next figure: since the Second World War, the income share of the top 10% of the U.S....

Tags: open thread

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/747a76dd-f018-4d0d-a9f3-4069bf2f5a93

from Bernard Guerrien and RWER no. 83 One of the most widespread myths in economics, but also in sociology and political science, is that game theory provides “tools” that can help solve concrete problems in these branches – especially in economics. Introductory and advanced textbooks thus often speak of the “applications” of game theory that are being made, giving the impression that they are revolutionizing the social sciences. But, looking more closely, we see that the few...

from Lars Syll it is not the fact that science occurs that gives the world a structure such that it can be known by men. Rather, it is the fact that the world has such a structure that makes science, whether or not it actually occurs, possible. That is to say, it is not the character of science that imposes a determinate pattern or order on the world; but the order of the world that, under certain determinate conditions, makes possible the cluster of activities we call ‘science’. It does...