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from Peter Radford Today is quite an anniversary.  It is fifty years since Milton Friedman’s article on the responsibilities of corporate management appeared in the New York Times.  Whilst it was not the only argument in favor of the shift towards a narrow focus on shareholder value, it was certainly one of the more persuasive and influential.  I have long held that Friedman’s reputation was ill-deserved because of his overt ideological bias and thus lack of any pretenses to scientific...

I’ve been working on the idea of a Livable Income Guarantee for some time. This is a version of the participation income idea put forward by the late Tony Atkinson. ANU has just published a policy brief on the idea, written jointly with Tim Dunlop, Jane Goodall, Troy Henderson and Elise Klein. It’s not the ultimate theoretical ideal for ideas like Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee. Rather, it’s a policy that could be introduced now, within the existing fiscal framework....

By all accounts this last Thursday September 11th, Wisconsin was all set to have a smooth election this fall. The state’s 1,850 municipal clerks had printed at least 2.3 million absentee ballots in preparation of another surge in absentee voting (which occurred earlier this year – April) and had already mailed 378,482 of them. They were well under way to meeting the Sept. 17 deadline established by state law when ballots had to be mailed. A deadline by...

from Lars Syll Many economists respond to criticism by saying that ‘all models are wrong’ … But the observation that ‘all models are wrong’ requires qualification by the second part of George Box’s famous aphorism — ‘but some are useful’ … The relevant  criticism of models in macroeconomics and finance is not that they are ‘wrong’ but that they have not proved useful in macroeconomics and have proved misleading in finance. When we provide such a critique, we often hear another mantra to...

Public law and economics after the financial crisis Mstis Fernanda Madi, Renny Reyes, and Vicente Bagnoli (editors) Kindle Edition $5.89 –  US  UK  DE  FR  ES  IT  NL  JP  BR  CA  MX  AU  IN Paperback $12.99 –  US  UK  DE  FR  ES  IT  JP  CA

from  Karim Errouaki and WEA Commentaries The health, economic, social and political crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic will reconfigure the geopolitics of international relations and globalization. We are only at the beginning of this crisis, particularly on the economic and social fronts. Many sectors, such as tourism, transportation and entertainment, will only recover over a very long time; many jobs will be destroyed. In contrast, other sectors are insufficiently developed and...

This conference is open for submissions  SUBMIT YOUR PAPER Call for Papers The United States declared an economic war on China in early 2018. Economic warfare is a unilateral action that questions the existence of multilateralism and places the question of what regime we are about to enter after the weakening of the existing multilateral trade agencies. US trade policy opens the door for new relationships between emerging market economies and international financial institutions on...

from Lars Syll But I do not believe that the route to sounder economic reasoning will involve an abandonment of economists’ penchant for reasoning with the use of models. Models allow the internal consistency of a proposed argument to be checked with greater precision; they allow more finely-grained differentiation among alternative hypotheses, and they allow longer and more subtle chains of reasoning to be deployed without both author and reader becoming hopelessly tangled in them. Nor...

A friend sends a picture of the sky at 9:30 AM in San Francisco CA.  The color matches other pictures I have seen. Picture 1