from Lars Syll We welcome Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman’s contribution and the debate it has inspired. We share much of their agenda for an economics “beyond neoliberalism” … Nonetheless, we believe that Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman do not go far enough in their calls for reform. The vision they paint is still focused on the discipline of economics and anchored in the core ideas of neoclassical theory that dominated the field in the twentieth century … The behavioral economics critique of the...
Read More »COVID-19 depression antidote
from Lars Syll [embedded content]
Read More »Dark times
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...
Read More »Coronavirus deaths by country – March 20, 19:00 GMT
The problem of weak first principles
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...
Read More »Corona virus thinking . . .
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...
Read More »Open thread March 21, 2020
How to get to a UBI
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...
Read More »Will the virus crisis cause another derivatives crisis ?
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...
Read More »Issue 91 of real-world economics review
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...
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