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May this year be better than last.  Any predictions?

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates. Rigour is needed to prevent the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. The conclusions are never more accurate than the data. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. It should never be true, though it is still often said, that...

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....