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General equilibrium — economics as ideology
from Lars Syll Although I never believed it when I was young and held scholars in great respect, it does seem to be the case that ideology plays a large role in economics. How else to explain Chicago’s acceptance of not only general equilibrium but a particularly simplified version of it as ‘true’ or as a good enough approximation to the truth? Or how to explain the belief that the only correct models are linear and that the von Neuman prices are those to which actual prices converge...
Read More »Launch!
Launch of Economics in Two Lessons ANU today (6pm Thursday 16th May) at Fred Gruen Seminar Room, HW Arndt Building ANU Share this:Like this:Like Loading...
Read More »The MMT debate
from Lars Syll [embedded content]
Read More »Kenneth Burke Predicted Jeff Bezos’s Moon Colony Dream 48 Years Ago
Over a time span of forty-four years, Kenneth Burke wrote a series of four essays beginning with “Waste — or the Future of Prosperity,” published in 1930, and concluding with “Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One” in 1974. Between those two bookends were “Recipe for Prosperity: ‘Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want.,'” in 1956 and “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision,” in 1971. Burke made explicit the affinity between the four essays in each successive...
Read More »The US labor market is deteriorating for black men
from Dean Baker The April jobs report was, for the most part, pretty good news. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, a level not seen in almost 50 years. The survey of businesses showed the economy generated more than 260,000 new jobs in the month — a very strong pace of job growth. While not great, the average hourly wage grew 3.2 percent. That is more than a percentage point above the 2 percent inflation rate, meaning that wages are at least rising faster than prices, and...
Read More »The history of randomness
from Ken Zimmerman After the cognitive revolution, Sapiens invented questioning and then questions. And Sapiens questioned everything. What happens next? Why did this happen rather than something else? Will each human die, when, and why? Who invented humans? Why were humans invented? What are the answers? One of the answers humans invented to deal with this and similar questions is randomness. Other inventions to deal with Sapiens’ questioning are chance, mathematics, and probability....
Read More »Income gini coefficient world map
Income gini coefficient map according to The World Bank (2014)
Read More »Open thread May 14, 2019
The age of Doris Day…
Let’s not forget that she once played a union worker, in ‘The pajama game’. With the song ‘racing with the clock‘. Also, here a blogpost of mine about how in ‘The Age of Doris Day’ apt new institutions enabled everybody to work less and have better lives, in stead of a part of the population being entirely unemployed and miserable.
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