Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The gender distribution of migrant workers has a macroeconomic impact – it affects both the level and the volatility of remittance inflows, as the Asian experience shows. The gender distribution of cross-border migration obviously matters because women migrating for work face very different conditions from those of men migrants, whether in the source country, or in the process of travel or in the destination country. These are crucially affected...

from Lars Syll First,​ it was Paul Krugman. Then came Kenneth Rogoff. And now Lawrence Summers has felt the urge to attack MMT and defend mainstream economics: There is widespread frustration with the performance of the economy … Altered economic conditions have led to the development of new economic ideas … And now, these new ideas are being oversimplified and exaggerated by fringe economists who hold them out as offering the proverbial free lunch: the ability of the government to spend...

Dean Baker In Canada, everyone in the country is guaranteed access to health care by the government. The same is true for France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands and every other country that we think of as comparable in terms of levels of wealth, democracy and economic development. In spite of providing universal care, these countries also all spend much less on health care than the United States. In Canada, per person spending is 60 percent what it is in the United States. In...

Where are the millionaires? (Figures in thousands, US$) Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2018 How does inequality in the US compare? (Most recent Gini coefficient scores) Source: World Bank Where the 1% have the largest wealth share Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2018 More income in America is going to 1% of the population Income share of the top 1% Source: World Inequality Database https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47456308

from Lars Syll In his critique of MMT the last couple of weeks, Krugman has claimed Stephanie Kelton and other MMTers have got things terribly wrong: Anyway, what actually happens at least much of the time – although, crucially, not when we’re at the zero lower bound – is more or less the opposite: political tradeoffs determine taxes and spending, and monetary policy adjusts the interest rate to achieve full employment without inflation. Under those conditions budget deficits do crowd out...

from Dean Baker Matt Bruenig — the president of the progressive, grassroots-funded People’s Policy Project think tank — put forward a creative set of policy proposals last month on child care and family policy under the title of the Family Fun Pack. It prompted a major discussion in progressive circles on child care policy, helped in part by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s important proposal in this area that was released the next week. In the hope of prompting the same sort of debate on policy...

I have come across two academic reviews of my book which can be found here and here. There is also a nice popular review in the Irish Times that can be found here. Advertisements

from Peter Radford Some jumbled thoughts prompted by my recent reading of Robert Skidelsky’s book, “Money and Government” Just how anti-social is economics? I don’t think the question is difficult to answer: economics in its modern mainstream form is, at its heart, designed to undermine democratic government.  It is, therefore, profoundly anti-social. The genesis of this antipathy towards democracy is all the way back in the beginning moments of economics as an intellectual discipline...

The central idea of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as I understand it, is that, rather than worrying about budget balances, governments and monetary authority should set taxation levels, for a given level of public expenditure, so that the amount of money issued is consistent with low and stable inflation. In this context, the value of the net increase in money issue is referred to as seigniorage. To the extent that seigniorage is consistent with stable inflation, it is achieved by...

from Lars Syll The axioms of revealed preference have been part of the foundations of economics since they were formulated by Paul Samuelson in 1947. These principles allowed economists to continue to use the calculus of utilitarianism even though utilitarianism had ceased to be a fashionable philosophical doctrine. And they enabled economists to give a particular, and special, meaning to the term rationality. In modern economics rationality is equated with consistency. But consistency,...