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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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from Malgorzata Dereniowska Call for Papers The advent of digital economy creates new challenges for businesses, workers, and policymakers. Moreover, business prospects for artificial intelligence and machine learning are evolving quickly. These technologies have transforming implications for all industries, businesses of all sizes, and societies. The digitalisation of economic activities calls for a deep reflection on the forces that will shape the future of the global economy. Aims of...

from Maria Alejandra Madi Against a rationalist top down approach to policy making, the evidence-informed policy and practice has rapidly evolved in the last two decades. In this line of research, a new book What Works Now? Evidence-informed Policy and Practice has been edited by Annette Boaz, Huw Davies, Alec Fraser and Sandra Nutley.  It offers not only a synthesis of the role of evidence in policy making but also an analysis of its use in recent economic models and practices in the UK,...

from Lars Syll Well, if we are to believe most mainstream economists, models are what make economics a science. In a Journal of Economic Literature review of Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules, renowned game theorist Ariel Rubinstein discusses Rodrik’s justifications for the view that “models make economics a science.” Although Rubinstein has some doubts about those justifications — models are not indispensable for telling good stories or clarifying things in general; logical consistency does...

(Dan here…op-ed lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts, written before coffee on a Sunday morning and feeling older I bet.  Thinking of older, my first computer was a Commodore 128, which isn’t even a minimum RAM amount on my Kindle much less my phone.  Still, I like my two year old basic laptop and a stripped down Windows 10 for personal use.  My wife has an Apple product.  I control my e-mail by being a curmudgeon, which I find much more efficient...

Willian Nordhaus can’t keep his “Nobel Prize” because he doesn’t have one. Alfred Nobel never set up a prize for economics because he recognised that it is not a science – not even a “dismal science” – and that most of the research has little to do with the real world, being founded on ideas which are palpably untrue. What Nordhaus has is a Swedish Banker’s prize for promoting neo-liberal ideas about money for the benefit of the world’s super rich. They call it the “Nobel Prize” despite...

from Lars Syll Nordhaus’s transgressions are immense. His ‘damage function’ which he uses to estimate global warming damage is incorrect and uses data that has nothing to do with climate change. Despite this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses his model to advise governments about the economic impact of global warming. Nordhaus and other mainstream climate economists certainly have a lot to answer for. Their thinking has seriously delayed action to avert damage done...