Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll [embedded content]

from David Ruccio Motto In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. – Bertolt Brecht ( trans. John Willett, from the Svendborg Poems) I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus for the past two months (the last real post, aside from daily cartoons, was back in January). But readers have encouraged me to get back in the game and resume my “occasional” commentary on economics, culture, and society. Right now, in these dark times—as the number of...

from Bernard Beaudreau and RWER #91 Economics is both a social and non-social (pure and applied) science, social in its quest to understand human behavior in the realm of goods and services, and non-social in its understanding of material processes – that is, the way in which goods and services (our bread and butter) are produced. It therefore stands to reason that for it to be successful, it must decipher how human beings think, and second, how inanimate material processes behave. It...

I am still trying to wrap my head around the coronavirus disaster.  Here is some current thinking . . . The immediate cause of the economic slowdown is a collapse in both demand and supply due to social isolation.  This will have at least two knock-on effects.  First, the initial collapse in economic activity will be magnified by a traditional demand multiplier effect.  Second, the collapse in economic activity will lead to widespread formal and informal...

Last year I published a book chapter arguing that the first step way to get to a Universal Basic Income was to expand the existing benefit system, increasing payments and removing conditionality (relevant extract over the fold). This is often called a Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI). I counterposed the GMI approach to the alternative of making a small payment to everyone in the community, and then trying to increase it over time. I suggested three initial steps Assuming a...

I had an inquiry about this and am posting my response Some relatively good news on this. The volume of over-the-counter derivatives, including Credit Default Swaps, has generally been declining since the Global Financial Crisis. It’s still large and a potential source of danger.  The place to go for detailed information is the Bank of International Settlements. Here’s a press release from late 2017 with a graph for the declinehttps://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1711.htmI’ve attached...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA – Subscribers: 26,420 subscribe RWER Blog ISSN 1755-9472– A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,468 members, join – Sister open access journals: Economic Thought and WEA Commentaries– WEA Online Conferences back issues issue no. 91 16 March 2020download whole issue Complexity, the evolution of macroeconomic thought, and micro foundationsDavid Colander 2 Models and reality: How did models...