Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll Mainstream economists often hold the view that criticisms of econometrics are the conclusions of sadly misinformed and misguided people who dislike and do not understand much of it. This is really a gross misapprehension. To be careful and cautious is not the same as to dislike. And as any perusal of the mathematical-statistical and philosophical works of people like for example Nancy Cartwright, Chris Chatfield, Hugo Keuzenkamp, John Maynard Keynes, Tony Lawson, Asad...

                                          Google Hits Paul Krugman            1,490,000 Amartya Sen             1,340,000 Esther Duflo                 832,000 Abhijit Banerjee           693,000 Michael Kremer            667,000 Daniel Kahneman         588,000 Joseph Stiglitz              520,000 Alan Greenspan            514,000 Ben Bernanke              510,000 Jeffrey Sachs          489,000 Yanis Varoufakis    461,000 Thomas Piketty          453,000 Dani Rodrik            432,000 Tyler...

Good overview from the CDC.

from Dean Baker Many people have become very concerned about the economy because of the stock market’s plunge in the last two weeks. While the spread of the coronavirus gives us very good reason to worry about the state of the economy, the plunge in in the stock market does not. In fact, those folks who are very concerned about wealth inequality can celebrate because the wealth of the top 1 percent has just dropped by around 10 percent, while the wealth of the bottom 50 percent has barely...

“…we have seen a calculation… which shows that the fixed charges, for machinery and the general management of a mill, are as nearly as possible equal to the cost of wages in the process.” In my earlier post on the “Wild and Dangerous Scheme” I teased the “egregious accounting error” committed by the author of the 1844 article in the Economist. In plain terms the error was double counting — the author deducts 16.5% from wages to compensate for a decrease...

I suggest that all of you read Conor Lynch’s piece on TruthDig: Joe Biden Would Be Donald Trump’s Dream Opponent [embedded content] Here are some apt quotations: Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that...

from Lars Syll It should be part of the academic competences of trained economists to be able to be clear about what their models are for; what the models are about; what the models are capable of doing, and what not; how reliable the models are; what sorts of criticisms have been levelled against the models and how the criticisms have been responded; what alternative models there are; etc. The challenge is not easy, and it is clear that it has not been met with sufficient exuberance and...

The DNC is about to nominate a man who has real difficulty completing an intelligent sentence. We are not talking fluffs or an occasional mistake. We are talking about a man who is mentally incompetent. The media will hide the fact. The DNC will protect him as much as possible. For this reason alone, Biden is the weakest possible candidate to face Trump.

from Lars Syll There have been over four decades of econometric research on business cycles … But the significance of the formalization becomes more difficult to identify when it is assessed from the applied perspective … The wide conviction of the superiority of the methods of the science has converted the econometric community largely to a group of fundamentalist guards of mathematical rigour … So much so that the relevance of the research to business cycles is reduced to empirical...