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from Lars Syll If we wanted highly probable claims, scientists would stick to​​ low-level observables and not seek generalizations, much less theories with high explanatory content. In this day​ of fascination with Big data’s ability to predict​ what book I’ll buy next, a healthy Popperian reminder is due: humans also want to understand and to explain. We want bold ‘improbable’ theories. I’m a little puzzled when I hear leading machine learners praise Popper, a realist, while proclaiming...

from Dean Baker In Washington policy circles, being a supporter of free trade is pretty much comparable to saying you believe in evolution. All reasonable people say they accept the doctrine and agree that tariffs and other forms of protectionism are evil and dirty. While there are good arguments for free trade as an economic policy, in the real world what passes for “free trade” is pretty much any policy that redistributes income upward, even if it is directly at odds with free trade. I...

After the righteous fury that pervaded Royal Commissioner Hayne’s interim report on the financial system, the final recommendations came as a letdown to everyone (except of course the insiders who bid up bank shares in anticipation of the news). This ought not to have been a surprise. Hayne correctly identified greed and dishonesty as the key drivers of wrongdoing. But greed (or, more politely, incentive) is the guiding principle of financialised capitalism as is seeking profit to...

Although this post was published on this blog over five years ago, it continues to be downloaded a thousand times a month.  (editor) from Asad Zaman An earlier post by Mady provided an introduction to Polanyi’s classic work The Great Transformation. This book is crucial to understanding both HOW and WHY we need to re-structure economic education today. Unfortunately, the book is quite complex, a bit dry and technical at times, and consequently hard to follow. Although many leading...

from Lars Syll The balanced budget paradox is probably one of the most devastating phenomena haunting our modern economies. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed politicians and economists recommend as “the sole solution.” One of the most...

from Lars Syll

from Dean Baker New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo tells us that he likes to “explore maximalist policy visions” in his columns. He falls well short of this goal in a piece calling for abolishing billionaires, which actually helps legitimate their existence. The piece repeatedly tells us that their wealth is driven by technology, a point that first appears in the subhead which refers to “tech-driven inequality.” The problem with Manjoo’s piece is that the inequality is not in fact...

There is a lot of ado about the French yellow vests who, somewhat violently and in a tenacious way protest the french government and battle the french police. The protests erupted when the Macron government increased gasoline and diesel prices.  Was this the proverbial drop which made the bucket overflow (”la goutte d’eau qui fait deborder la vase” or, to comply with Anglosaxon culture and to connect with the new nationalism in Anglosaxonia (not to be confused with Niedersachsen)): “the...