Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Peter Radford The sudden attention being given to the gyrations of Game Stop stock prices has caused all sorts of hand wringing within the hallowed walls of high finance.  In typical fashion the people who like to carry on their trading and associated activities beyond the public gaze are all a twitter because a bunch of apparently crazy outsiders are not adhering to the sedate rules of the game.  This produces truly odd results.  Normally virulently anti-government voices are...

from Dean Baker President Biden’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 is prompting a backlash from the usual suspects. As we hear the cries about how this will be the end of the world for small businesses and lead to massive unemployment, especially for young workers, minorities, and the less-educated, there are a few points worth keeping in mind. While $15 an hour is a large increase from the current $7.25 an hour. This is because we’ve allowed so much time to pass...

from Lars Syll Though an enthusiast of reason, I believe that rational choice theory has failed abysmally, and it saddens me that this failure has brought discredit upon the very enterprise of serious theorizing in the field of social study … Rational choice theory is far too ambitious. In fact, it claims to explain everything social in terms of just three assumptions that would hold for all individuals in all social groups and in every historical period. But a Theory of Everything does...

Tags: open thread

Tags: open thread

As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day. A logical choice would be the day our Federation came into force. Unfortunately for this idea, our Founders chose 1 Jan 1901. The first day of the 20th century[1] must have seemed like an auspicious choice for a...

from Dean Baker It is more than a bit bizarre that the New York Times can run a major piece about the lack of access of developing countries to Covid vaccines and never once mention the vaccines developed by China, Russia, or India. The piece is very useful in highlighting the fact that the United States and Europe have secured the vast majority of the 2021 production of the vaccines developed by western drug companies, leaving relatively few doses for the developing world. As a result,...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The pandemic, and the monetary and interest rate responses to it, are dictating which sectors are improving and which are stagnated or worse. But as vaccinations slowly progress, in springtime there may be growth in the garden. As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me a little bit for the work I put in,...

from Lars Syll Mainstream economics nowadays usually assumes that agents that have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty behave according to Bayesian rules, axiomatized by Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1954) — that is, they maximize 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 “money pump”argument – susceptible to being...