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There’s generally not a lot of common ground between fans of Robert Mundell (the intellectually respectable face of supply side economics) and those of Modern Monetary Theory. Yet in one very important respect, their ideas are two sides of the same coin. Mundell got his Nobel Memorial Prize, in large measure, for what’s been called the ‘impossible trinity’, namely that a country can’t have all three of a fixed exchange rate, an independent monetary policy and free capital movement....

from Lars Syll It can be said without great controversy that no other theoretical approach in this century has ever enjoyed the same level of ubiquity throughout the social sciences as the rational choice approach enjoys today. Despite this ubiquity, the success of the approach has been very tenuous. Its advance has been accompanied by an intense debate over its relative merit. The approach has been subject to the usual criticism of blatant inaccuracy given by outsiders to any would-be...

from Geoff Davies The study of economies needs to be fundamentally reworked. The dominant approach has been in a pre-scientific state, akin to medicine before Pasteur. It has not even been in a state comparable to Ptolemaic astronomy, which did make usefully quantified predictions of planetary positions in the sky. We need to return to fundamental questions. What is the nature of an economy? What is the purpose of an economy? How does an economy relate to the larger society and natural...

from Barry Gills and Jamie Morgan We live in a time of Climate Emergency. Nevertheless, our collective actions do not yet approximate a real understanding nor fully appropriate actions. We are not yet acting as if we are facing an urgent and life threatening Emergency. What does ‘Climate Emergency’ actually mean? According to David Attenborough: It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face...

from Asad Zaman In previous post on the founding of the Bank of England, we have explained that Central Banks were created to provide financing for wars. In fulfilling this role, they had several advantages over the state, enabling them to get credit, and get it at low interest rates. For a number of reasons, this was not possible for sovereign states.  read more . . .

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Despite the global dominance of capitalism, growth rates continue to trend downward. Mainstream economists blame the slowdown on various ‘distortions’, but as this animation by Elvire Thouvenot shows, the reality is quite different. Capitalists seek not more income per se, but greater power-through-redistribution, which they achieve by strategically stymying growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTpanudMToA

Looking for a different story in the business pages of The Guardian, I happened across a headline stating The men who plundered Europe’: bankers on trial for defrauding €447m. That attracted my attention, but the standfirst, in smaller print, was even more startling Martin Shields and Nick Diable are accused of tax fraud in ‘cum-ex’ scandal worth €60bn that exposes City’s pursuit of profit For those without a calculator handy, that’s about $A100 billion. I think of myself as...

from Lars Syll Taking into account the methodologies that support some policy practices that favour inductive reasoning and randomized control trials of impact evaluation (RCTs), there is a controversy around the utilization of these attempts to build experimental programmes or policy intervention … As the decision-making policy process in the real world relies on institutional factors that may be different elsewhere, the methodology based on RCTs does not provide a credible basis for...

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