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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...

Tags: open thread

We are in the process of making changes to the comment section of Angry Bear to tackle the issue of comments disappearing or being delayed in posting. We need feedback from readers on their experience Friday and over the weekend: e-mail Dan at [email protected] or Bill at [email protected]. ...

from Lars Syll Mainstream economics nowadays usually assumes that agents that have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty behave according to Bayesian rules (preferably the ones axiomatised by Ramsey (1931), de Finetti (1937) or Savage (1954)) — that is, they maximise expected utility with respect to some subjective probability measure that is continually updated according to Bayes theorem. If not, they are supposed to be irrational, and ultimately — via some “Dutch book” or...