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I am winding down Azizonomics, though, as I am sure you are already aware it has already existed in a winded down state for many years, particularly since I left The Week in 2014. I mostly started this blog in 2011 because I was concerned about the economy, and the future, and was reading a lot, and jotting down my thoughts. From today, I will be focusing on my new podcast: Cybernetics Chat. The focus of that is much more a mixture of techno-utopianism, ecology, science fiction, and...

The Academy of Marxism of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) organised an International Symposium on ‘Building a Community of Shared Future for Mankind During Fighting against COVID-19’. The symposium took place on the occasion of the launch of the collective volume titled ‘China’s Fight Against The COVID-19 Epidemic: Its Contribution And Implications To The World In The Eyes Of Foreigners, in which I contributed a paper titled ‘The Economic and Political Consequences of the...

from Lars Syll The rational expectations hypothesis presupposes — basically for reasons of consistency — that agents have complete knowledge of all of the relevant probability distribution functions. And when trying to incorporate learning in these models — trying to take the heat of some off the criticism launched against it up to date — it is always a very restricted kind of learning that is considered. A learning where truly unanticipated, surprising, new things never take place, but...

Kevin Drum argues that he is: One of the key questions raised by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory has been whether he represents a new turn in American politics or merely a blip who will be quickly forgotten if he loses in 2020. Over the past four years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing the evidence about this, and the conclusion I’ve come to is pretty simple: Trump is a blip. Let’s back up a bit. For a very long time Democrats have believed that demographics...

from Blair Fix Prices are caused by supply and demand, right? So say neoclassical economists. If you’ve bought their fairy tale, I recommend you watch this video. In it, Jonathan Nitzan demolishes the neoclassical theory of prices. It’s a master lesson in how to deconstruct a theory. Here’s the 100-word summary. Nitzan shows that the neoclassical theory of prices fails in six ways: Neoclassical theory hinges on utility that cannot be measured It relies on demand and supply curves...

from Lars Syll A view yours truly often encounters when debating MMT is that there is an inflationary bias in MMT and that its framework ignores expectations. Hmm … It is extremely difficult to recognize that description. Given its roots in the writings of Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, it is, to say the least, rather amazing to attribute those views to MMT. Let me just quote one source to show how ill-founded the critique is on this issue: MMT recommends a different approach to the federal...

The 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Trumpism and the other populist movements which have followed in their wake have grown out of the frustrations of those hurt by the economic policies advocated by conventional economists for generations. Despite this, textbooks continue to praise conventional policies such as deregulation and hyperglobalization. This textbook demonstrates how misleading it can be to apply oversimplified models of perfect competition to the real world. The math works...

from David Ruccio 2019 was a very good year for the world’s wealthiest individuals. The normal workings of global capitalism created both more billionaires and more combined wealth owned by those billionaires. According to Wealth-X, which claims to “have developed the world’s most extensive collection of records on wealthy individuals and produce unparalleled data analysis to help our clients uncover, understand, and engage their target audience,  as well as mitigate risk,” the size of...

… is available here, and over the fold. Hi all,Another update on what I’ve been doing, nearly all remotely of course.I’ve started work on my new book, Economic Consequences of the Pandemic, which I’ve agreed to write for Yale University Press. The title is a play on two polemical pieces by John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (a critique of the Treaty of Versailles) and Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill (written when Churchill, as Chancellor to the...