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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,...

I swore off big yellow grader posts a while back, but I can’t resist. Adani’s head of communications, Kate Campbell, has a piece in the Mackay Mercury (paywalled, but I found it on PressReader) getting stuck into the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The article is full of attacks on IEEFAs ties to the Rockefeller Family Foundation and similar lefty groups. But what struck me was the photo, which was supposed to show that Adani had indeed started work....

IJOPEC has published the e-book ‘Globalisation and Public Policy’ edited by Kaoru Natsuda K. et al. The lin for the e-book is the following: http://www.ijopec.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019_13.pdf I have contributed the first chapter with a paper titled ‘De-globalisation and the Return of the Theory of Imperialism’. The links for my chapter are the following: [embedded content] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336252454_Globalisation_Public_Policy...

Despite all the recent stock market volatility the actual S&P 500 PE on trailing operating earnings is almost exactly where my model says it should be. The biggest problem is that the market PE  is about 19 and bond yields are under 2%.  The quick and dirty rule of thumb is that a 100 basis point change in yields should generate a 100 basis point change in the S&P 500 PE.    With bond yields already under 2% the upside potential for the market PE...

from Lars Syll Krugman writes: “So how do you do useful economics? In general, what we really do is combine maximization-and-equilibrium as a first cut with a variety of ad hoc modifications reflecting what seem to be empirical regularities about how both individual behavior and markets depart from this idealized case.” But if you ask the New Classical economists, they’ll say, this is exactly what we do—combine maximizing-and-equilibrium with empirical regularities. And they’d go on to...

She’s right. One of the reasons nations fail to address climate change is the belief that we can have infinite economic growth independent of ecosystem sustainability. Extreme weather events, melting arctic ice, and species extinction expose the lie that growth can forever be prioritized over planetary boundaries. It wasn’t always this way. The fairytale of infinite growth—which so many today accept as unquestioned fact—is relatively recent. Economists have only begun to model...

from Mark Weisbrot The latest de-escalation of the trade war with China — with exemptions from some tariffs on both sides — has left markets uncertain as to whether it will end before there is serious escalation. But if I were managing a hedge fund, I would bet on it. To see why, we must start with Trump himself. Distraction is Trump’s modus operandi; this was true for his 2016 campaign and he must have concluded from its success that this was also the best way to govern. Trump’s trade...

This morning, in Greece’s Parliament, MeRA25’s parliamentarians are staging an all-out struggle against the ratification of disastrous contracts between the previous (SYRIZA) government and multinational oil companies. The contracts to be ratified give the companies (including Exxon-Mobil and Total) full licence to drill, extract and exploit gas & oil reserves across Greece’s beautiful seas (Ionian, Aegean,...