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from Lars Syll We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or dialectical. My goal is less the clarification of what...

from David Ruccio The warnings about the consequences of global warming are becoming increasingly dire. And with good reason. Just last month, a report by a multidisciplinary research team published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences made the case that even fairly modest future carbon dioxide emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophic effects, with melting permafrost releasing methane to ratchet up global temperatures enough to drive much of the Amazon to die...

from Asad Zaman In the context of the radical Macroeconomics Course I am teaching, I was very unhappy with the material available which tries to explain what Keynes is saying. In attempting to explain it better, I constructed an extremely simple model of a primitive agricultural economy. This model has a lot of pedagogical value in that it can demonstrate many complex phenomenon in very simple terms. In particular, Keynesian, Marxists, Classical and Neo-Classical concepts can be...

from Dean Baker Last month Amazon joined Apple, becoming the second company in the world to have a $1 trillion market capitalization. Amazon’s accomplishment didn’t cause quite as much celebration as Apple’s – it pays to be number one – nonetheless this was treated as a milestone that all of us should view as good news. Actually, the celebratory coverage of both events demonstrated the incredibly ill-informed nature of much economic reporting in the United States. A big run-up in share...

from Thomas Palley Some progressive economists are now arguing for the idea of a Job Guarantee Program (JGP), and their advocacy has begun to gain political traction. For instance, in the US, Bernie Sanders and some other leading Democrats have recently signaled a willingness to embrace the idea. In a recent research paper I have examined the macroeconomics of such a program. Whereas a JGP would deliver real macroeconomic benefits, it also raises some significant troubling economic and...

There’s an exceptional opportunity for a bright and critical-minded economist who is as passionate about social justice and working on behalf of unions and working people as they are about working with spreadsheets: CLC Senior Economist. Application deadline September 21st.   More details and job posting here. Enjoy and share:

Some progressive economists are now arguing for the idea of a Job Guarantee Program (JGP), and their advocacy has begun to gain political traction. For instance, in the US, Bernie Sanders and some other leading Democrats have recently signaled a willingness to embrace the idea. In a recent research paper I have examined the macroeconomics [...]

This paper reconstructs the income – expenditure (IE) model to include a distinction between government purchases of output versus government production. The distinction has important consequences for output and employment multipliers. The paper also extends the IE model to incorporate a government job guarantee program (JGP), and the extended model illuminates the automatic stabilizer properties [...]

from David Ruccio Everyone, it seems, is writing their version of the lessons to be learned after the crash of 2008. And most of them are getting it wrong. Here, for the record, are some of the lessons I’ve taken from the crash: What has changed—and, equally significant, what hasn’t—during the past decade? Mainstream economists got globalization wrong The policy consensus on economics has not fundamentally changed Mainstream economics has fallen in the eyes of the public—and for good...