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from Lars Syll  A science that fails to reflect on its own history and neglects critical methodological and theoretical questions about its practice is a science in crisis. As early as 1991, a commission led by Anne Krueger—featuring esteemed economists such as Kenneth Arrow, Edward Leamer, and Joseph Stiglitz—highlighted a fundamental weakness in graduate economics education. Drawing from their own experiences, they observed an alarming disconnect between theoretical and econometric...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Back in the early 80s, Marshall and Warren made the link between gastric ulcers and Helicobacter pylori infections. Suddenly, a painful chronic condition that increased the risk of stomach cancer was curable with antibiotics. A major public health scourge today in America is dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. There’s growing evidence that periodontitis is linked to […] The post Dental health and mental health appeared first on...

from Asad Zaman The Puzzle of Newton’s Mind Isaac Newton is often celebrated as the ultimate rationalist, the scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the cosmos and ushered in the modern age. But there is a problem with this image—one that is so inconvenient that it has been quietly brushed aside. Newton, the father of modern physics, was also a theologian who wrote over a million words on religious matters. By sheer volume, he devoted more time to obscure theological debates than to the...

As I type this, Trump is threatening tariffs on anyone who challenges the interests of America’s technology oligarchs, all of whom are now paying obeisance at this court. Technology is the US biggest weapon against the free world of which it was formerly part, and the right place to fight back. But what can be done? I’ll start with the most straightforward case. X should be banned outright, for precisely the reasons that the US Congress tried to ban TikTok, and for its...

from Dean Baker CEOs and other top management in the U.S. are far more highly paid than their counterparts in Europe and Asia. NYT columnist Jeff Sommer had an entertaining piece on how many of the business leaders who eagerly embraced DEI a few years back are now being very quick to abandon it. This is not terribly surprising to those of us who never took the commitment to DEI very seriously, but there is an important aspect to his discussion that he leaves out. Sommer spends much of the...

from Peter Radford Yes, I am confused. At least I admit it. There’s a lot going on, and someone like me often wallows in the activity as a way of understanding.  I like to see the systemic rather than the particular.  I am very bad, I admit, at details.  I gravitate to the long term.  What, I usually ask, does all this imply for  what comes next?  And how does it connect with the past? This biases me towards the dramatic.  The swoosh of certainty when an avenue appears within the clutter...

Quick quiz. Suppose you read a headline in the online version of the Wall Street Journal (or NY Times etc) stating that, from now on, US Treasury bonds would be redeemed in crypto. Would your response be (i) That’s absurd. Either it’s April Fools Day or someone has hacked the website (ii) That’s unlikely. Surely [1] Wall Street will be able to kill this crazy idea (iii) That will be tricky. Which cryptocurrencies will be included and what will be the exchange rates? If your...

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism is...

from Dean Baker The news has been filled with stories in recent days about Republicans desperately hunting for $2.0-$2.5 trillion (2-3 percent of the budget) in budget cuts over the next decade to cover the cost of extending tax cuts to the rich. While Elon Musk and his DOGE team have been screaming about corruption all through the government, they actually have found little that can be helpful here. They appear to have found virtually nothing by way of actual corruption. Most of what...

from Nat Dyer Readers of this blog will be well aware of the myriad problems with the mainstream economics that has dominated university and political life for the past few decades. As Lars Syll wrote here last month, too much of the profession “has since long given up on the real world” and is happy to investigate the “thought-up worlds” of unrealistic economic models. Too much attention is focused on how the parts of the model fit together, rather than on how well the models fit with...