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from Lars Syll Some go so far as to insist that development interventions should be subjected to the same kind of randomised control trials used in medicine, with “treatment” groups assessed against control groups. Such trials are being rolled out to evaluate the impact of a wide variety of projects – everything from water purification tablets to microcredit schemes, financial literacy classes to teachers’ performance bonuses … The real problem with the “aid effectiveness” craze is that...

from David Ruccio I cringe when I listen to or watch these interviews. But here it is, with the Real News Network. The interview was based on my recent blog post, “Economics of poverty, or the poverty of economics.” [embedded content] I also want to recommend a recent piece by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven [ht: ms], who argues that The interventions considered by the Nobel laureates tend to be removed from analyses of power and wider social change. In fact, the Nobel committee specifically...

Going Digital What is the Future of Business and Labour? A conference from the WEA 11th November to 9th December, 2019 visit conference website contacts: Maria Alejandra Madi: [email protected] Małgorzata Dereniowska: [email protected]

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...