Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh We are nearing the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States that sparked a Global Financial Crisis,affecting every economy in significant ways. That crisis generated extraordinary monetary policy responses in the advanced economies, with low interest rates and unprecedented expansion of liquidity, in an effort largely driven by central banks to keep their economies afloat. By contrast, expansionary fiscal policy...

from Lars Syll How come that econometrics and statistical regression analyses still have not taken us very far in discovering, understanding, or explaining causation in socio-economic contexts? That is the question yours truly has tried to answer in an article published in the latest issue of World Economic Association Commentaries: The processes that generate socio-economic data in the real world cannot just be assumed to always be adequately captured by a probability measure. And, so,...

from Dean Baker The media have treated us to an array of stories warning us of the terrible labor shortage facing the country. Some of the pieces have been general, such as this CNBC piece on the labor shortage “reaching a critical point,” or this Wall Street Journal article on wage gains “threatening profits.” Others have been more industry-specific, such as The Washington Post’s highlighting of the trucker shortage that threatens the “prosperous economy.” Then there is this New York...

It’s been  cold here in Brisbane for the last few days, at least by our subtropical standards, with overnight minimums of 6 degrees in the city, and negative temperatures in  towns like Stanthorpe in the nearby Granite Belt. That occasioned lots of news coverage, with the observation that this was the coldest temperature we’ve had since 2014 and one of the coldest since 2000. The same was true for much of Eastern Australia. Melbourne had its coldest morning in several years, and  a...

from Lars Syll The distinctions between hard and soft sciences are part of our culture … But the important distinction is really not between the hard and the soft sciences. Rather, it is between the hard and the easy sciences. Easy-to-do science is what those in physics, chemistry, geology, and some other fields do. Hard-to-do science is what the social scientists do and, in particular, it is what we educational researchers do. In my estimation, we have the hardest-to-do science of them...

from Merijn Knibbe I’m trying to write a book about the relation (not) of neoclassical macro-economic concepts to the concepts of macro-economic statistics. Which leads one to interesting places one can’t explore. If there is anybody out there in search for an interesting idea for a master thesis or something light that, these might do: A qualitative and quantitative exploration of ‘hoboism’ in the 1930’s looking at it using the lens of ‘involuntary part time unemployment’ An...

from Asad Zaman Introduction — I wrote this essay a while ago, and I am adding this preface here to explain more about WHY I wrote it: Preface: A central problem of our age is the turning of “means” into “ends”.  It is obvious that money, by itself, is not a source of pleasure –  it is a means to this end. Similarly, freedom is useful only if it is freedom to allow us to do something we want to do. Nobody would want the freedom to sell himself into slavery — which is effectively the only...

from Lars Syll Axiomatic decision theory was pioneered in the early 20th century by Ramsey (1926) and de Finetti (1931,1937), and achieved remarkable success in shaping economic theory … A remarkable amount of economic research is now centered around axiomatic models of decision … What have these axiomatizations done for us lately? What have we gained from them? Are they leading to advances in economic analysis, or are they perhaps attracting some of the best minds in the field to deal...