Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker I just finished reading Carter’s book and I will agree with the general assessment. It is an outstanding book that brings together much useful material on the life and influence of Keynes. While I am of course familiar with Keynes’ history and the history of Keynesianism, there is much that I learned here. In particular, I am impressed with the importance he gives Joan Robinson in spreading the ideas of Keynes, especially to followers from the United States. When I first...

from Lars Syll In Radical Uncertainty, John Kay and Mervyn King, two well-known British economists, state that rather than trying to understand the ever-changing, uncertain and ambiguous environment by trying to understand “what’s going on here”, the economics profession has become dominated by an approach to uncertainty that requires a comprehensive list of possible outcomes with well-defined numerical probabilities attached to them. Drawing widely on philosophy, anthropology,...

Amid all the strange, alarming and exciting things that have happened lately, the fact that real long-term (30-year) interest rates have fallen to zero has been largely overlooked. Yet this is the end of capitalism, at least as it has traditionally been understood. Interest is the pure form of return to capital, excluding any return to monopoly power, corporate control, managerial skills or compensation for risk. If there is no real return to capital, then then there is no capitalism....

from Lars Syll As time goes on, and 2020 turns into 2021, the long-held idea that governments are like households and businesses that have to repay their debts, or even that government deficits must be financed by debt at all, will increasingly be exposed as a mistake. It will be more or less a return to Keynes, except with the twist that the Keynesian aim of balancing the budget over the course of the cycle – deficits in bad times, surpluses in good times – doesn’t matter, not that...

from Dean Baker The push for a $15 an hour minimum wage has developed considerable political momentum over the last decade. It is a very real possibility that we will see legislation imposing a national minimum wage of $15 an hour by 2024 if Joe Biden wins the election this fall. That would be a great thing, it would mean a large increase in pay for tens of millions of workers, but it is still very modest compared to what the minimum wage would be if it had kept pace with productivity...

from Peter Radford The collection of papers edited by Uskali Mäki and published in 2001 under the title: “The Economic World View, Studies in the Ontology of Economics” seems to be quite pertinent given the reaction to my recent comments on complexity.  It is a wonderfully rich source of thought about what, exactly, economics is, which is something that seems to confound a great number of people.  Quite often I get the sense that some critics are upset with economics because it isn’t...

from David Ruccio The existing alphabet soup of possible recoveries—V, U, W, and so on (which I discussed back in April)—is clearly inadequate to describe what has been taking place in the United States in recent months. That’s because there’s no single path of recovery for everyone. For some, the recovery from the pandemic crisis has been just fine, while for many others there has been no recovery at all. Instead, things are going from bad to worse. In other words, there’s a growing gap...