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In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. Luke 1:3 (as will turn out below, this quote is not frivolous) Summary. The Gaza Ministery of Health, Airways and the World Health Organization have published robust data sets on victims of war-related violence in Gaza. Médecins Sans Frontières...

from Lars Syll Pretending that the distribution of income and wealth that results from a long set of policy decisions is somehow the natural workings of the market is not a serious position … Pretending that distributional outcomes are just the workings of the market is convenient for any beneficiaries of this inequality, even those who consider themselves liberal … But we should not structure our understanding of the economy around political convenience. There is no way of escaping the...

from Dean Baker I’m not one to generally tout the wisdom of the economics discipline, but it actually does offer some useful insights into the likely motive for the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare (UHC). According to media accounts, the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was angered by his own and others’ experiences being turned down when submitting claims for healthcare service. United and other insurers make a profit by restricting the claims they pay, so their profit...

from Lars Syll It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods of formalising a system of economic analysis … that they expressly assume strict independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and authority if this hypothesis is disallowed; whereas, in ordinary discourse, where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are doing and what the words mean, we can keep “at the back of our heads” the necessary reserves and qualifications and...

I wrote this for a Guardian panel. The published version was cut for space reasons, so here’s the full version The central concern expressed by the Reserve Bank in defending its high-interest rate policy is that expectations of higher inflation may become entrenched, requiring a further, more painful round of contractionary monetary policy in the future. Even after stripping out the effects of various “cost of living measures”, the RBA’s estimated core inflation rate is only just...

A PLOG is a ´Persistent Large Output Gap´. Read: a long period of high unemployment. Literature about PLOGs tries to mitigate one of the ideas of economic orthodoxy, especially the unsubstantiated idea that lowering high post-economic crisis unemployment will fuel inflation. According to this literature, which is quite empirical, it doesn´t. However, this somewhat older literature does not yet consider the post-2009 Euro Area experience. Here, I will propose an updated definition of...

from Peter Radford  This is something I need to get off my desktop.  It’s just for fun … Asymmetry is the very beginning and end of an economy.  It’s the bumps that matter.  Explain them and you explain the economy.  After all the very notion of exchange presumes differences between those involved, and difference is just another way off saying asymmetry.  Sweep the bumps away with a broad brush of supposedly superb logic and you eliminate the very object of your study.  That is if your...

Last week, I gave a presentation at the 2024 Australian Basic Income Fellows Workshop. Most of the talks were about Basic Income trials, which have been undertaken around the world. I focused on something more modest but perhaps more achievable: getting evidence on the effects of Scrapping or Scaling Back Mutual Obligation and Income Management. You can download the Powerpoint presentation here or see the slides on my Substack Share this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll Economists have sometimes misled us with their belief that it is their job to tell “white lies” to scare the population into “behaving themselves.” We think that is the wrong approach. This book trusts you, the reader, with that truth. We trust you to do what you can to spread the truth and to hold policymakers accountable. The truth is that government faces political constraints. It faces resource constraints. It faces technological constraints. But it does not, cannot,...

 Στα πλαίσια των σεμιναρίων του Τμήματος Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής που διοργανώνει το Εργαστήριο Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής (ΕΚοιΠ – https://socpollab.panteion.gr/) την Τετάρτη 11 Δεκεμβρίου 2024 (18:00-21:00) ο Σταύρος Μαυρουδέας (Καθηγητής, Τμ. Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο) θα παρουσιάσει εισήγησε με θέμα «Η έννοια της δομικής αλλαγής στα διαφορετικά ρεύματα της οικονομικής σκέψης και στην τρέχουσα οικονομική πολιτική». Τα σεμινάρια του ΕΚοιΠ είναι ανοικτά και διεξάγονται στην...