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from Blair Fix Let’s talk econophysics. If you’re not familiar, ‘econophysics’ is an attempt to understand economic phenomena (like the distribution of income) using the tools of statistical mechanics. The field has been around for a few decades, but has received little attention from mainstream economists. I think this neglect is a shame. As someone trained in both the natural and social sciences, I welcome physicists foray into economics. That’s not because I think their approach is...

from Lars Syll There really is something about the way macroeconomists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. In mainstream economic theory models largely function as a substitute for empirical evidence. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing...

I made a short comment in PRESS TV news (11-3-2021) on the recent incidences of police brutality and the popular revulsion against the policies of the Greek right-wing government. Following are (a) the summary of the comment and (b) the video links of the News Widespread popular revulsion against the policies of the Right-wing government These events are the result of the accumulated popular anger against the right-wing government and its policies which can be codified in...

from Ken Zimmerman  (originally a comment) If you had asked somebody 100 years ago, ‘How’s the economy doing?’ they would not have known what you were talking about. At the time, people talked about things like banking panics, and national wealth, and trade. But, according to Zachary Karabell, this thing we call the economy — this thing that we constantly measure with specific numbers — was not really invented until the 20th century. Specifically, around 1930. “It was invented because of...

from Ikonoclast  (originally a comment) I think I can give an example of why economic reductionism or economic simplism or economism do not work. It revolves around the fact that the world, even the socioeconomic world, is extremely (if not infinitely) complex and endlessly changing and mutating. There are numerous gradations and changes to every phenomenon possible. About 25 years ago, I commissioned a house to be built. About 25 weeks ago I commissioned a landscape (hardscape and...

from Lars Syll The kinds of laws and relations that economics has established, are laws and relations about entities in models that presuppose causal mechanisms being atomistic and additive. When causal mechanisms operate in the real world they only do it in ever-changing and unstable combinations where the whole is more than a mechanical sum of parts. If economic regularities obtain they do it (as a rule) only because we engineered them for that purpose. Outside man-made “nomological...

from Dean Baker As can be easily shown the bulk of the upward redistribution from the 1970s was not due to a shift from wages to profits, it was due to an upward redistribution among wage earners. Instead of money going to ordinary workers, it was going to those at the top end of the wage distribution, such as doctors and dentists, STEM workers, and especially to Wall Street trader types and top corporate management. If we want to reverse this upward redistribution then we have to take...

That’s the only lasting policy achievement of Trump’s Presidency. But for his brand of grievance politics, losing is winning. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

That’s the headline for my latest piece in Inside Story, covering the Biden rescue package. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Peter Radford If you were to ask me what the greatest intellectual error of the past fifty years has been I wouldn’t hesitate.  Shareholder value.  It’s an easy response.  Yes, it reflects my own curious interest in the fundamentals of business and its intersection with economics, but it is also emblematic of so much more. Derived as it is from the wrong turn in economics and politics in the middle of the last century it carries with it so many of the ill founded ideas that have...