Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll [embedded content] A great video, but — there’s always a but — unfortunately also not without some analytical shortcomings. The point of making a randomized experiment is often said to be that it ‘ensures’ that any correlation between a supposed cause and effect indicates a causal relation. This is believed to hold since randomization (allegedly) ensures that a supposed causal variable does not correlate with other variables that may influence the effect. The problem with...

The barriers facing black people in America today are numerous and daunting:  poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods, lack of income, wealth, and connections, persistent formal and informal discrimination in so many settings.  The list goes on, and it certainly includes many problems with our criminal justice system, from over-criminalization to degrading conditions of imprisonment to oppressive and violent policing. Of all the problems facing black...

from David Ruccio [embedded content] More than 50 years ago (on 14 April 1967), Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his famous speeches, on “The Other America,” at Stanford University.* King patiently explained to the audience of students and faculty members that, while in his view “riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” they are “in the final analysis. . .the language of the unheard.” Today, as protestors take to the streets across America, in response to the recent...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 24 – 28 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.The news can be summed up in two words: “less awful.” With the exception of one employment measure, every other indicator has bounced off their recent lows, some very substantially. Meanwhile lower interest rates are setting the stage for growth after the pandemic effects ebb. As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me with a...

Ο Ντέιβιντ Χάρβεϋ θα πρέπει να ανακηρυχθεί ένας από τους μεγάλους διανοητικούς υποκριτές της εποχής μας. Εμφανίζει τον εαυτό του – με την αγαστή υποστήριξη των μέσων μαζικής ενημέρωσης – ως «τον» ειδήμονα στην Μαρξιστική Πολιτική Οικονομίας, ενώ δεν είναι οικονομολόγος και οι γνώσεις του όσον αφορά την Μαρξιστική Πολιτική Οικονομία είναι επιεικώς φαιδρές. Εμφανίζεται επίσης ως βασικός σημαιοφόρος του αντι-καπιταλισμού, ενώ στην πραγματικότητα είναι ένας αναρχο-ρεφορμιστής....

David Harvey should be declared one of the great intellectual pretenders of our time. He poses – with immense media help – as ‘the’ doyen of Marxist Political Economy whereas he is not an economist and he is totaly ignorant of Marxist Poltical Economy. He also poses as the standard-bearer of anti-capitalism whereas in fact he is an anarcho-reformist. His latest utterances (https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_global_unrest ) are revealing:   capital right now is too big to fail a...

from Peter Radford It is always interesting to read what people say in response to what you write.  It is also always educational.  I enjoy the learning. I recently wrote a short piece meant to be a little on the light side pondering the odd comparison of the use of the word essential in our vernacular understanding of it, and the way in which standard economic theory suggests we compute our various levels of worth.  I quoted J.B. Clark with respect to this latter point.  I made the...

from Lars Syll Simon Wren-Lewis is one of many mainstream economists that staunchly defends the idea that having microfoundations for macroeconomics moves macroeconomics forward. A couple of years ago he wrote this: I think the two most important microfoundation led innovations in macro have been intertemporal consumption and rational expectations …  [T]he adoption of rational expectations was not the result of some previous empirical failure. Instead it represented, as Lucas said, a...

from Asad Zaman The Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the late 1970’s consisted of a move towards free markets, and away from government regulation and control. Of central importance in this move was the deregulation of financial institutions. We would like to understand WHY this change took place, and WHAT were the effects of this change on the working of the USA/UK economies. Summary of Basic Facts: Financial de-regulation, guided by an ideological belief that free financial markets would...