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from Norbert Häring The Better Than Cash Alliance (Visa, Mastercard, Citibank, Bill Gates, USAID) coordinates the global war against cash from New York. Now, the city council of the headquarters of the Alliance has decided to oblige all brick and mortar stores and restaurants to accept cash. The justification of the regulation is a low blow for the alliance’s financial inclusion propaganda. According to a USA-Today report, retail stores, restaurants, and bars will have to accept cash in...

from Lars Syll The point is that a superficial analysis, which only looks at the numbers, without attempting to assess the underlying causal structures, cannot lead to a satisfactory data analysis … We must go out into the real world and look at the structural details of how events occur … The idea that the numbers by themselves can provide us with causal information is false. It is also false that a meaningful analysis of data can be done without taking any stand on the real-world causal...

There have been Australia Days more loaded with fear and foreboding than yesterday’s (in 1942, for example), but not many. Richard Flanagan’s jeremiad in the New York Times might be overstated, but it’s a lot closer to the mark than our appalling Prime Minister’s suggestion that we should take the time to celebrate our greatness as a nation. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Peter Radford “American economics harbors fierce political debates over theory, methodology, and policy.  In practice and in comparative perspective, however, the main trend over the course of the twentieth century has been the standardization of training as well as a homogenization of evaluation criteria that has marginalized nonorthodox approaches.  After institutionalism was dethroned by the rise of mathematical economics and more politically challenging forms of intellectual...

[embedded content] C-SPAN “In this first portion of day 3 of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead House impeachment manager, began opening arguments by explaining the history of why the framers included impeachment in the Constitution. He then laid out the specifics of the charges against President Trump. Throughout his presentation, Representative Schiff used digital slides, graphics, and videos,...

from Lars Syll How, then, can social scientists best make inferences about causal effects? One option is true experimentation … Random assignment ensures that any differences in outcomes between the groups are due either to chance error or to the causal effect … If the experiment were to be repeated over and over, the groups would not differ, on average, in the values of potential confounders. Thus, the average of the average difference of group outcomes, across these many experiments,...

from Thomas Palley The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm. For four decades the US economy has been trapped in a “Groundhog Day” cycle in which policy engineered new stock market booms cover the tracks of previous busts. But though each new boom...

The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm. For four decades the US economy […]

from Lars Syll Randomised experiments require much more than just randomising an experiment to identify a treatment’s effectiveness. They involve many decisions and complex steps that bring their own assumptions and degree of bias before, during and after randomisation … Some researchers may respond, “are RCTs not still more credible than these other methods even if they may have biases?” For most questions we are interested in, RCTs cannot be more credible because they cannot be applied...