Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The idea that, thanks to social media, we are all sorted into “echo chambers” where we only hear views identical to our own, is a commonplace. I think the whole idea of echo chambers is misinformed. There’s a range of viewpoints close enough to your own that discussion is useful, and a range so far distant that no such discussion is possible. There’s no reason to suppose that this range will encompass the party political spectrum in some particular country. In the case of...

from Asad Zaman Economists do not understand inflation. Daniel K. Tarullo. Former Governor, Federal Reserve Board should surely be in a position to know. I will list some key conclusions from his paper with the revealing title:  Monetary Policy Without a Working Theory of Inflation : We do not, at present, have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policy-making Many … good monetary policymakers … have an almost...

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 orthodox/mainstream/neoclassical economics tries to argue for the existence of The Law of Demand – when...

@Brankomilan leads us to this (french) piece about Austria. It states that the Austrian government enacted a new law which authorizes working days of 12 hours and working weeks of 60 hours. A). This is a clear case of retrogression. It’s good to read what, in 1921, the International Labor Office stated in its first annual report:  ““It would therefore be almost impossible to exaggerate the truly revolutionary character of the events which during the last years of the war or after the war...

from Dean Baker As we reach the end of the year, the economic recovery in the United States is approaching a new record for duration. In June, it will have its tenth birthday, passing the 1990s recovery as the longest one in US history. While recoveries do not die of old age, they do die. The length of this recovery has many looking for recession prospects on the horizon. At the moment, they are not clearly visible. Before examining the risks, it is worth saying a bit about the good news....

from Lars Syll There are at least around 20 or so common misunderstandings and abuses of p-values and NHST [Null Hypothesis Significance Testing]. Most of them are related to the definition of p-value … Other misunderstandings are about the implications of statistical significance. Statistical significance does not me an substantive significance: just because an observation (or a more extreme observation) was unlikely had there been no differences in the population does not mean that the...

from Dean Baker Many of the richest people in the country make their fortune in the financial sector. While it is surely the case that many of the high rollers in the financial sector are hard working and intelligent, these traits are not the key to getting really rich in the modern economy. As has always been the case, nothing can beat being well connected. The latest tale of the well-connected rich is a study, by Markov Processes International, of the 10-year returns of the endowments...