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from Lars Syll Do you believe that 10 to 20% of the decline in crime in the 1990s was caused by an increase in abortions in the 1970s? Or that the murder rate would have increased by 250% since 1974 if the United States had not built so many new prisons? Did you believe predictions that the welfare reform of the 1990s would force 1,100,000 children into poverty? If you were misled by any of these studies, you may have fallen for a pernicious form of junk science: the use of mathematical...

Scientific economics needs more memes: short statements which capture the imagination and stick to the mind of lay people as well as economists. One of the well known memes of classical and neoclassical economics is the definition of money: Money is: * A means of exchange * A store of value * A unit of account As such, it’s not bad. But it’s incomplete. The unit of account and the means of exchange do not have to be the same thing. In the olden days, in the Dutch Republic (as well as...

from Blair Fix Hello, my name is Blair Fix. I’m a recovering academic writer. Let me explain. I’m convinced that a major part of grad school is learning to decipher academic prose. Let’s face it — academic writing is usually bad. It’s dense. It’s jargon filled. It’s often monotonous. In short, academic writing begs the reader not to read it. So a big part of grad school is learning how to read prose that was designed not to be read. This takes great effort and a healthy dose of masochism....

from Lars Syll Many mainstream economists – still — think that game theory is useful and can be applied to real-life and give important and interesting results. That, however, is a rather unsubstantiated view. What game theory does is, strictly seen, nothing more than investigating the logic of behaviour among non-existant robot-imitations of humans. Knowing how those ‘rational fools’ play games do not help us to decide and act when interacting with real people. Knowing some game theory...

from Arturo Hermann Dear Randall, I appreciate your article “Alternative Paths to Modern Money Theory” and the novel perspective put forth by MMT in respect to the very narrow views of Austrian and neoclassic theories. Starting from this, I would like to make some constructive remarks around the following aspects:  (I) In the article you stress that (p.6), when there is a “sovereign national currency” (p.5) and flexible exchange rates, “The sovereign currency issuer:  does not face a...

Given that Millennials are now approaching middle age, could someone compile all the 1990s cliches about Boomers for recycling, rather than doing it piecemeal? Then we can use the Millennial stuff (lazy, entitled, not like in my day) on Generation Z. Personally, I’m waiting to hit Generation Trump. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from David Ruccio Yesterday, the winners of the 2019 winners of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics were announced. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer were recognized for improving “our ability to fight global poverty” and for transforming development economics into “a flourishing field of research” through their experiment-based approach. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared: This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers...

from Lars Syll There are two basic challenges that confront any account of extrapolation that seeks to resolve the shortcomings of simple induction. One challenge, which I call extrapolator’s circle, arises from the fact that extrapolation is worthwhile only when there are important limitations on what one can learn about the target by studying it directly. The challenge, then, is to explain how the suitability of the model as a basis for extrapolation can be established given only...