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from Ken Zimmerman A few basics for economists on money. Money is not a thing or even a physical object (although money may use physical objects). Money is a cultural process (institution) created to credit and clear, satisfy and impose obligations, duties, and responsibilities. Historians often misunderstand money because they focused too much on what it leaves behind, coins, contracts, pay and tax records, etc., rather than the networks created via money and their working out over time....

from guydauncey Complete agreement! Ecological literacy needs to be as standard as literacy and numeracy. Ecology 101 needs to be mandatory in every school and university. Colleges should not allow entrance unless students have passed it. Voters should not vote for candidates and corporations should not hire CEOs who have not done likewise. To set the change in motion we just need some leading universities to make a joint announcement that starting in two years’ time they will not accept...

from Ikonoclast The elites of course are in favor of the status quo. They are made immensely richer than average and most of this oligarchy (being rich, white men over 60) expect to be dead or still wealth-insulated when the unsustainable system begin collapsing. They are probably fairly evenly divided between those who don’t know and those who don’t care that a collapse is inevitable with business as usual. The masses are largely too poorly educated to know what is coming. Public...

from Lars Syll In a post up here earlier this week yours truly questioned the scientific value of Chicago economics. I took as an example the SMD theorem, that has unequivocally showed that there does not exist any condition by which assumptions on individuals would guarantee neither stability nor uniqueness of a general equilibrium solution — and that it, therefore, is intellectually dishonest to just go on pretending that it is still acceptable to model real-world economies building on...

Via Diane Ravitch’s blog is a link to this paper Great Britain school priveatization run amok. In the course of the last quarter century, governmental entities in both the United States and England have sought to encourage educational innovation by creating publicly funded schools that are independent from many rules that apply to locally controlled schools. These schools are called charter schools in the United States and academy schools (academies) in...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh In the past decade, talk of “currency manipulation” has become a frequent trope in discussions of international trade. Much of this stems from the US government’s aggressive position on the bilateral trade deficits the US has with several countries, and the associated tendency to blame these deficits on “currency manipulation” by governments of these countries. This has generated a wider tendency for others to assume that some developing countries...

from Jason Hickel Even people who are concerned about ecological breakdown are forced to submit to this logic: if you care about human lives, then you must call for growth first and foremost, regardless of the ecological consequences; we can deal with the environment later, once everyone has enough. But there will be no later, because the problem of scarcity is never solved – there is never enough. Whenever scarcity is about to be solved, it is always quickly produced anew. In 1930,...

from Lars Syll Positivism does not seem to realize at all that the concept of verifiability — or that the position that ‘the meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification’ — is covered by a dialectical penumbra in spite of the apparent rigor of the sentences used in the argument … I hope the reader will not take offense at the unavoidable conclusion that most of the time all of us talk some nonsense, that is, express our thoughts in dialectical terms with no clear-cut meaning...

from Ken Zimmerman Most economists (and policy makers) of the last 50 years see no difference between potato chips and microchips, favor unrestricted globalization, and celebrate the loss of US manufacturing jobs as a desirable evolutionary step toward a purely service economy. But human culture is invented by many people. Many of whom have never read economics and don’t spend much time with policy makers. They insist we pay attention to the basics. And the basics in this case is...

from Lars Syll The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts.  In the society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole is more than a sum of parts. This fact shows up when mainstream economics tries to argue for the existence of The Law of Demand – when the price of a...