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Initial claims positive to start July, but trend in continuing claims the weakest in 9 years I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress.My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. Initial jobless claims last week were 209,000. This is in the lower part of its range...

from Lars Syll Econometrics looks “sciency”. Once in a seminar presentation I displayed two equations, one taken from Econometrica and the other from the Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and challenged the audience to tell me which is which. No one volunteered to tell me which is which, including at least one hard-core econometrician. Economics is a social science where the behaviour of decision makers is not governed purely by economic considerations but also by social...

real-world economics review​​​​​​​Please click here to support this open-access journal and the WEASubscribers: 26,499     subscribe      RWER Blog      ISSN 1755-9472 A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,432 members, join ​​​​​​​back issuesIssue no. 88  ​​​​​​​10 July 2019download whole issue Make-believe empiricism Is econometrics relevant to real world economics?Imad A. Moosa          download  The fiction of verifiability in economic “science”Salim Rashid         ...

from Ken Zimmerman There is no separation between culture and economy. They are one another. Historian Richard Hofstadter notes, as have many others that American culture is “…diverse and contradictory” … “visionary and down-to-earth, deeply radical and solidly conservative, coldly prudent and· unexpectedly wild.” As American culture changes, so does American economy. America is Puritanism with its omnipotent God, souls predestined to heaven or hell before birth, and certainty that...

from Lars Syll Paul Samuelson claimed that the ‘ergodic hypothesis’ is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume that ergodicity is essential to economics? The answer can only be — as I have argued here here here here and here — NO WAY! Obviously yours truly is far from the only researcher being critical of Paul Samuelson. This is what Ole Peters writes in a highly interesting article on Samuelson’s stance on...

Here’s my email update. Sign up if you’d like to get it delivered to your mailboxHi all,It’s been quite a while since my last email news, which I sent out before the May election.  Following Labor’s loss, I resolved to avoid commentary on political strategy or day-to-day politics, and to spend more time thinking about global and long term issues, such as climate change and the global choice between socialist and Trumpist futures.I’ve mostly stuck to that resolve discussed the...

from Jason Hickel Imagine if we were to even just partially decommoditize London’s housing stock; for example, imagine the government was to cap the price of housing at half its present level. Prices would still be outrageously high, but Londoners would suddenly be able to work and earn significantly less than they presently do without any loss to their quality of life. Indeed, they would gain in terms of time they could spend with their friends and family, doing things they love,...

from Ken Zimmerman Robert Reich suggests that one thing we could do to deal with these problems is to abolish billionaires. Robert, lays out the ways billionaires are able to accumulate that much money. First, monopoly. We can address this by vigorously enforcing anti-trust laws already on the books. Second, copyrights and patents. Robert suggests shortening these by half or more. Third, insider information. Here we need to both enforce fines to take away all the money gotten in this way,...