Tag Archives: Uncategorized

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...

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...