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In 1912 Wesley C. Mitchell, Veblen’s best student and one of the three or four most important economists of the first half of the twentieth century, published ‘The backward art of spending money’ (the link will directly download the article) in the American Economic Review. The article is about the (monetary) problems housewives encounter when they have to manage a household and a family and having scant time and money to do so. It is related to the present day Levy institute ‘time...

from Lars Syll There is something that just does not sit very well with Oxford macroeconomist Simon Wren-Lewis’ view of modern macroeconomics. On more than one occasion has this self-proclaimed ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomist approvingly written about the ‘impressive’ theoretical insights New Classical economics has brought to macroeconomics. In one of his latest blog posts he once again  shows how devoted  he is to the Chicago übereconomists and their modelling endeavours (emphasis...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan In our work, we’ve argued that, contrary to the conventional creed, capitalists dislike recovery. Their main driving force, we’ve claimed, is not the absolute level of their income, but its distributive share, and this later emphasis has far-reaching implication. Whereas the absolute level of capitalist income correlates with the absolute level of economic activity, the distributive share of that income depends on capitalist power. And in the...

from Deniz Kellecioglu and the current issue of the RWER The academic field of economics has been under an intensified pressure after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which began in September 2007 (cf. Backhouse 2010). This pressure involved demands to refine, reform, or completely overhaul the field. The latter group viewed the GFC as another dismal outcome of a dominant economics that is significantly supportive of financial interests, while being hostile to states, peoples, and the...

An almost-universal feature of current Australian political commentary is the idea that the process of major party breakdown is a symmetrical one, affecting both side of politics equally. At a global level, this is broadly true. European social democratic parties have faced huge challenges arising from their complicity in austerity, and their inability to formulate a coherent response to racism and xenophobia. Quite a few, like PASOK in Greece, have disappeared altogether. In Australia,...

from Lars Syll In a discussion today on twitter one discussant was questioning if economics really could be considered a science, adding that in physics — contrary to economics — “there are no different school of thoughts on ‘Newton’s Laws of Motion’. To this Simon Wren-Lewis answered: Exactly the same is true of mainstream economics. There are also groups who cannot live with the mainstream who form schools of thought, like MMT. But mainstream economics is a science, like medicine. But...

The following article was written for the Progressive Economy Forum’s publication – Ten Years Since the Crash: Causes, Consequences and the Way Forward – circulated at Labour Party Conference in October, 2018. 13th September, 2018 To fix things we need to first tell ourselves the correct story about how we got here. Financialization is easily the least studied and least explored reason behind our inability to create shared prosperity – despite our being the richest and most successful...

from Peter Radford I feel bad for anyone who ventures into the social sciences.  Society is, after all, a devilishly complex subject.  Pull on any one string and you can convince yourself that you have understood it only to realize the next day that you missed the entire story.  It’s a maze: enter at your own risk. Of course the flip side is that you can never be entirely wrong either.  Just about any half-baked idea has a smidgeon of truth hidden within it. Take a look at mainstream...

from Lars Syll Judea Pearl’s and Bryant Chen’s Regression and causation: a critical examination of six econometrics textbooks — published in Real-World Economics Review no. 65 — addresses two very important questions in the teaching of modern econometrics and its different textbooks — how is causality treated in general, and more specifically, to what extent they use a distinct causal notation. The authors have for years been part of an extended effort of advancing explicit causal...