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WEA Commentaries

Volume 9, Issue No. 1 Download the issue as a PDF        Karl Polanyi and social justice     Maria Alejandra Madi What can economics learn from medicine     Peter Swan How monetary union is sacrificed on the alter of competitiveness    Norbert Häring The Demise of Neoliberalism in Mexico today: if so, so what?      Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid               Please support the WEA by paying a membership fee   or making a small donation

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The Limits of Human Joy and Sorrow

In this post I will use revealed preference and assume people are rational. Sorry. I’m an economist and I can’t entirely resist. I will argue that our joy and suffering is bounded, that we can’t be infinitely happy or infinitely miserable. The first argument is standard, the second is something Peter Mollgaard thought of the instant I explained the first. Both discussions are typically limited (as economists tend to be) to selfish swinish agents who care...

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Ontario Electricity VII – Committee Testimony

The PC Government in Ontario has introduced Bill 87 which would eliminate the rate-based borrowing to subsidize electricity prices and replace it with Government borrowing. Last week’s Provincial Budget estimates that the required borrowing to subsidize electricity prices for 2018/19 was $2.8 billion. It is likely to exceed $3 billion in 2019/20. Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America where the Government would directly subsidize electricity prices. Today the...

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Ontario Electricity VII – Committee Testimony

The PC Government in Ontario has introduced Bill 87 which would eliminate the rate-based borrowing to subsidize electricity prices and replace it with Government borrowing. Last week’s Provincial Budget estimates that the required borrowing to subsidize electricity prices for 2018/19 was $2.8 billion. It is likely to exceed $3 billion in 2019/20. Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America where the Government would directly subsidize electricity prices. Today the Government...

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Economics vs. the Natural Sciences: The methodology of “as if”

from Michael Hudson What is even more remarkable is the idea that economic assumptions need not have any relationship to reality at all. This attitude is largely responsible for having turned economics into a mock-science, and explains its rather odd use of mathematics. Typical of the modern attitude is the textbook Microeconomics (1964:5) by William Vickery, long-time chairman of Columbia University’s economics department, 1992-93 president of the American Economic Association and winner...

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Fear of Floating

from Asad Zaman Published in Dawn, Mar 27, 2019, a leading Pakistani newspaper, in context of public debate about moving to a floating exchange rate regime — In 1971, when Nixon shocked the world by abandoning the convertibility of dollars to gold, he dragged all of us, unwillingly, into the modern era of floating exchange rates. Since then, economic theories have changed. But old habits die hard; economists and policymakers today continue to think and operate as if they live in the old...

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Weekly Indicators for April 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Lower interest rates have to some extent been offset by weaker real money supply. In any event, they haven’t fed through into other, shorter term indicators just yet. As always, clicking over and reading should bring you up to date on the economy, and reward me a little for my efforts. ...

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Radical uncertainty — a question of economic methodology

from Lars Syll Between 1920 and 1950, a debate took place which defined the future of economics in the second half of the 20th century. On one side were John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight; on the other, Frank Ramsey and Jimmie Savage. Knight and Keynes believed in the ubiquity of “radical uncertainty”. Not only did we not know what was going to happen, we had a very limited ability to even describe the things that might happen. They distinguished risk, which could be described with the...

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