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from Peter Radford We have heard a great deal in the American media about the so-called Biden reform agenda.  The huge injection of government spending into our hibernating economy is meant not just to sustain it until we arrive at a post-pandemic moment when it will spring back to life by itself, but also to reform it.  That is to say the $1.9 trillion package is not just disaster relief, but is also politically motivated to change the economic landscape beyond the pandemic. I think the...

from Duncan Austin and current issue of RWER The key issue is not that economics is not a valuable way of thinking – it clearly is – but rather that the discipline lost sight of its boundaries and unwittingly propagated an exaggerated sense of its scope. Ironically, it achieved this by fatefully downplaying the significance of one of its own discoveries made a century ago. Given the profound influence of economics within modern culture, this oversight cannot be dismissed as mere academic...

from Lars Syll The situation started to change in the 1960s, when antirealism went on the rampage in the social studies community as well as in Anglo-American philosophy. This movement seems to have had two sources, one philosophical, the other political. The former was a reaction against positivism, which was (mistakenly but conveniently) presented as objectivist simply because it shunned mental states. I submit that the political source of contemporary antirealism was the rebellion of...

download whole issue Is a capitalist steady-state economy possible? Is it better in socialism? Theodore P. Lianos The “ideal market” as a normative figure of thoughtTanja von Egan-Krieger The rise of human capital theory Blair Fix How downward redistribution makes America richerSteve Roth The moral dilemma and asymmetric economic impact of COVID-19Constantine E. Passaris Pigou and the dropped stitch of economicsDuncan Austin Third world development:...

One of the striking features of the Dr Seuss fuss is that most commentators seem to be treating this as something new. No one I’ve read in US commentary on the topic seems to be aware that “Dr Seuss, cancelled” is a shot-for-shot remake of a British drama. It reminded me immediately of the arguments about golliwogs in Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, which started just about the time (a long, long time ago) I grew out of those books, and moved on to reading such gems as the Famous Five ....

from C. P. Chandrasekhar With President Joe Biden having put through Congress and signed a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the world is set to experience one of the biggest fiscal boosts of recent times, larger than that resorted to in response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Together with the $900 billion short term stimulus announced by the earlier administration end-December 2020, the level of pandemic induced Federal spending in the US is estimated at 13 per cent of GDP this...

from Lars Syll Mainstream macroeconomics can only progress if it gets rid of the DSGE albatross around its neck. It is better to do it now than to wait for another 20 years because the question is not whether but when DSGE modeling will be discarded. DSGE modeling is a story of a death foretold … Getting rid of DSGE models is critical because the hegemonic DSGE program is crowding out alternative macro methodologies that do work … DSGE practitioners, who with a mixture of bluff and...

Larry Summer is still criticizing the American Recovery Plan.  Summers: In his latest attack on the recent rush of stimulus, Summers told David Westin on Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” that “what was kindling, is now igniting” given the recovery from Covid will stoke demand pressure at the same time as fiscal policy has been aggressively eased and the Federal Reserve has “stuck to its guns” in committing to loose monetary policy.“These...

from Asad Zaman While the car is functioning well, one does not usually open up the engine. But when the car breaks down, it becomes necessary to open it up to see what is wrong. This is the situation today, as the failure of econometric models manifested itself in the global financial crisis, as well as many other occasions. The tragedy is that these same failed models continue to be used today; no serious alternatives have been developed. The reason for this is that the methodology used...