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In an impressive overview of the state of Canadian Political Economy, a new book Change and Continuity ed. by Mark P. Thomas et.al. includes two important articles on the continuing relevance of the staple thesis. On the one hand, Jim Stanford’s “Staples Dependence Renewed and Betrayed: Canada’s Twenty-First Century Boom and Best” does just as its title tells because of the reversion to dependence on petroleum as a staple export since 2000 and the deindustrializing effect...

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through...

from Asad Zaman This series of posts is based on a single lecture (Lecture 13 of Advanced Macro II) exploring the evolving functions of Central Banks through time. It goes through a vast amount of material in a very short time, and hence is a very sketchy treatment. This is the 3rd post,  which deals with the period from WW! to the 1980s.  read more

from Blair Fix If you ask the average person what ‘science’ is, they’ll probably answer something like ‘it’s what we know about the world’. To the lay person, ‘science’ is a body of facts. To the trained scientist, however, ‘science’ means something different. It’s not a body of knowledge. It’s a method for determining what’s true and what’s not. To determine the way the world works, science appeals to evidence.The ideal of science is beautifully summarized by the motto of the Royal...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA issue no. 89Modern monetary theory and its criticsdownload whole issue Introduction: Whither MMT?The editors Alternative paths to modern money theoryL. Randall Wray Initiating a parallel electronic currency in a eurocrisis country – why it would workTrond Andresen An MMT perspective on macroeconomic policy spacePhil Armstrong Monetary sovereignty is a spectrum: MMT and developing countriesBruno Bonizzi,...

September jobs report: excellent in coincident and lagging sectors, cautionary in leading sectors HEADLINES: +136,000 jobs added (+135,000 ex-Census) U3 unemployment rate declined -0.2% from 3.7% to 3.5% (NEW LOW) U6 underemployment rate declined -0.3% from 7.2% to 6.9% (NEW LOW) Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown is coming....

from Blair Fix A revolution is underway around us and it’s called the digital. And it’s changing everything. More than 80% of wealth is now non-material. — Charles Foran in Just don’t say his name: the modern left on Karl Marx’s place in politics (41:30) Both critics and cheerleaders of capitalism claim it has. The critics see non-material wealth as a problem. Digital wealth, they say, is fictitious. It’s lost touch with reality. The cheerleaders of capitalism see the same thing as a...

from Lars Syll Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense; given that the primary problem is methodological, the issues seem to extend in...

from Asad Zaman In line with the pedagogical mission of this blog, I will be writing up a sequence of posts which explain the concept of a statistical distribution. As has been pointed out by numerous authors, a fundamental mistake in understanding concepts of uncertainty and probability was made in the early 20th Century, when views of Keynes and Knight were rejected, and ideas of Ramsey, De-Finetti, and other subjectivists were accepted. To set things right, we have start from scratch,...