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In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good...

from Peter Radford What are we to say of a discipline that steadfastly ignores reality in its pursuit of ever more formality in its methods? Wow. Steve Levitt has really shaken me. I come not to mock, but to follow up … Stand up and take a bow Ben Moll!  You daring soul. Clearly I need to explain. No sooner had I finished my comment on the irrelevancy of economics but I had confirmation — albeit unwittingly — in this morning’s Financial Times.  There on the editorial page was a short...

from Junaid Jahangir and current issue of RWER [Ha-Joon] Chang’s latest book Edible Economics (2022) crystallizes the narrative that he has developed through his popular books over the years. . . . I have reviewed the salient ideas as follows in a bid to draw out lessons I could share with my ECON 101 students. . . . the main ideas of Ha-Joon Chang can be distilled in point form as follows. Neoclassical economics gives precedence to mathematics over real-world issues of inequality and...

My latest in Crikey Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Diego Fedele)Peter Dutton can’t seem to take a trick on nuclear power. Any option he puts forward seems to vanish as soon as he makes a commitment. Since Dutton became opposition leader, he’s pushed the idea of small modular reactors (SMRs). At least in their original concept, these were reactors small enough (say 50-to-70MW capacity) to be built in a factory and shipped to sites where they could be installed in whatever number was...

“Political Economy of Inequality and Social Policy” Call for Papers for the 17th WAPE Forum Workgroup for “Political Economy of Inequality and Social Policy” 2-4 August, Panteion University Christos Papatheodorou & Zois Gerasimos Katsimigas Since the Industrial Revolution, the question of income distribution and its resulting economic inequality has evolved through distinct stages, becoming a prominent object of both scholarly inquiry and social policy. The...

Abstract. This note responds to Arne Heise’s critque of my article on Keynes’s denial of conflict in The General Theory. Heise’s response fails to show Keynes addressed conflict and makes several meritless criticisms regarding my treatment of Keynes and Keynesianism. It also fails to recognize the purpose of my article which was to show conflict […]

from Lars Syll Unlike anthropologists … economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a practice which frees us from limiting ourselves to societies which can be physically visited as sparing us the discomforts of long stays among savages. This method of society-invention is the source of the utopian character of economics; and of the mix of distrust and envy with which we are viewed by our fellow social scientists. The point of studying wholly fictional, rather than actual...

This paper presents a new formulation of conflict inflation labeled the “pass-through” approach, which contrasts with the existing “pressure balance” approach. The model generates Phillips styled inflation – unemployment dynamics that are a hybrid of Keynesian and NAIRU dynamics. Conflict inflation arises when economic activity rises above the consistent claims activity level, and it is […]

from a comment by Ikonoclast “A truth is permitted only a brief victory celebration between the two long periods where it is first condemned as paradoxical and later disparaged as trivial.” – Arthur Schopenhauer. As they break new ground, the Capital as Power theoreticians will encounter the “Schopenhauer Effect” over and over. When you point out something clearly for the first time, or even again after a long interregnum when few could see it, then everyone will say, “Oh, we always knew...

from Blair Fix and current issue of RWER Speaking of competition and losers, Ronald Reagan set the tone of the neoliberal era when, in 1981, he fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers (Houlihan, 2021). The message? Workers were losers who would be subjected to the discipline of competition. Reagan called it ‘morning in America’. But really, it was ‘morning for American big business’. Today, we are well into the next-day’s hangover, and we know how the party played out. For workers,...