Recently, I came across an interview with Dick Bryan and Mike Rafferty for the JACOBIN magazine. The interview concerns their analysis of financialisation and it can be accessed in the following web-address: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/financialization-capitalism-with-derivatives-australia. The interview has the telling title ‘How Finance Exploits Us’. It is not coincidence that a book on financialisation by Costas Lapavitsas carries the same title (‘Profiting Without Producing: How...
Read More »Observational data and causal inference
from Lars Syll Distinguished Professor of social psychology Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence and IQ testing in his Intelligence and How to Get It (Norton 2011). He also has some interesting thoughts on multiple-regression analysis and writes: Researchers often determine the individual’s contemporary IQ or IQ earlier in life, socioeconomic status of the family of origin, living circumstances when the individual was a child, number of siblings, whether the family had a...
Read More »Trump vs China
Trump should not forget that the Chinese leadership does not have to hold an election in 2020. I wonder who this gives an advantage in the trade war.
Read More »Econ 101
from David Ruccio It’s time to get back to blog writing—after a 6-month hiatus during which I taught my final two courses at the University of Notre Dame (A Tale of Two Depressions and Marxian Economic Theory) and prepared for my retirement (which involved, among other things, sorting through, packing up, and moving decades of “stuff”). Now, after 38 years of teaching, I am officially Professor of Economics Emeritus. But, rest assured, I plan to continue this blog and other writing...
Read More »Open thread July 6, 2019
Is inequality within countries getting better or worse?
from Jason Hickel In a recent Twitter post, Max Roser of Our World In Data claimed that the narrative about rising inequality within countries is incorrect. Inequality has been falling in as many countries as it has been rising, he said, “which should be really embarrassing for many news stories that suggest the opposite with great certainty.” Roser’s tweet referred to an interesting blog post by Joe Hasell, with a graph illustrating the change in the Gini index within countries...
Read More »Inequality and unsustainable consumption
Source: Extreme Carbon Inequality (Oxfam, December 2015)
Read More »MMT — the key insights
from Lars Syll As has become abundantly clear during the last couple of years, it is obvious that most mainstream economists seem to think that Modern Monetary Theory is something new that some wild heterodox economic cranks have come up with. That is actually very telling about the total lack of knowledge of their own discipline’s history these modern mainstream guys like Summers, Rogoff and Krugman have. New? Cranks? Reading one of the founders of neoclassical economics, Knut Wicksell,...
Read More »MMT macro final (3/3) entanglement
from Asad Zaman Previous posts ( MMT Macro Final 1/3 , and MMT Macro Final 2/3 ) have covered questions 1-4 and 5-8. This post covers the last 4 question of the MMT based Advanced Macro course I taught last semester at PIDE. The central methodological difference at the heart of my course was the principle of Entanglement: Theories cannot be understood outside their historical context, and history cannot be understood without understanding theories used by human agents to understand and...
Read More »How do student evaluations survive?
Among the few replicable findings from research on higher education, one of the most notable is that student evaluations of teaching are both useless as measures of the extent to which students have learned anything and systematically biased against women and people of color. As this story says, reliance on these measures could lead to lawsuits. But why hasn’t this already happened. The facts have been known for years, and potential cases arise every time these evaluations are used...
Read More »