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from Lars Syll An ongoing concern is that excessive focus on formal modeling and statistics can lead to neglect of practical issues and to overconfidence in formal results … Analysis interpretation depends on contextual judgments about how reality is to be mapped onto the model, and how the formal analysis results are to be mapped back into reality. But overconfidence in formal outputs is only to be expected when much labor has gone into deductive reasoning. First, there is a need to feel...

from Dean Baker President Joe Biden’s recovery and jobs plans have led to considerable alarm over the resulting increases in the deficit and debt. Most of these concerns are misplaced. The issue of whether a deficit is too large depends entirely on whether it causes us to push the economy too far, leading to inflation. The deficit for last year was $3.1 trillion, which was equal to 15.2% of GDP. This was by far the largest deficit, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II....

from Asad Zaman Defining Feature of Real Econometrics We can define “Real Econometrics” as being the search for causal relationships within a collection of variables. There exists an enormous amount of confusion about what exactly is a causal relationship. We will take a simple and practical approach, developed by Woodward in his book on “Making Things Happen”. Given a collection of variables X,Y,Z1,Z2,…,Zn, we will say that X is a cause of Y if we can create changes in Y by changing the...

Patrick Bond (Professor of Political Economy, University of the Western Cape, School of Government) has made a very illuminating video-presentation on the subject ‘Financialisation theories’. Part of the video-presentation is based on Mavroudeas S. & Papadatos F. (2018), ‘Is the Financialisation Hypothesis a theoretical blind alley?’, World Review of Political Economy vol.9 no.4. Our paper can be downloaded at...

from Peter Radford Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase writes his annual letter to shareholders, Wall Street quivers in anticipation at his wisdom.  This year’s is a doozy.  Dimon, it seems, wants to explain to us all that corporations play many roles in society and are not simply focused on “short term rapacious profit taking” (his words, not mine). Let me begin with an aside: why it is that an annual communication from a CEO to the shareholders of a corporation that he/she leads is...

Tags: open thread

That’s the title of my latest piece in Independent Australia, an extract from The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Hi everyone. I haven’t been posting much lately. Partly, there have been minor technical problems. But mostly, I’ve been frantically busy trying to finish the draft MS of Economic Consequences of the Pandemic, and haven’t found time to extract pieces suitable for comment. Normal service should resume soon. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll In 2016, Vox sent out a survey to more than 200 scientists, asking, “If you could change one thing about how science works today, what would it be and why?” One of the clear themes in the responses: The institutions of science need to get better at rewarding failure. One young scientist told us, “I feel torn between asking questions that I know will lead to statistical significance and asking questions that matter.” The biggest problem in science isn’t statistical...

from Jason Hickel While the scholarship on  degrowth  has  outlined  the policy changes that would be necessary to achieve a safe and equitable transition to an ecological post-growth economy, the deep logic of such an economy remains undertheorized. Are the reforms that degrowth scholars propose in and of themselves sufficient to euthanize the capitalist growth imperative? Here I want to address this question by elaborating further on the argument that expanding public goods and services...