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Keynes’ General Theory was a massive step forward relative to classical economics, but it was also a step backward in its denial of the conflictual nature of capitalism. There is need to understand Keynes’ technical contributions regarding the workings of monetary economies, but also need to understand the flaws within his thinking and the consequences […]

from Herman Daly and RWER issue 102 Let’s draw a big circle around the rectangle and label it “”Environment”.  The Earth-environment, let us say, has one input from space, solar energy, and one output back to space, waste heat. No significant material inputs from or outputs to space.[1] Materials circulate as energy flows through the environment. The inputs to the economy come from the containing finite environment and constitute depletion, a cost. The final outputs return to the...

Open thread February 7, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

from Lars Syll  In mainstream economics, both logic and mathematics are used extensively. And most mainstream economists sure look upon themselves as “twice blessed.” Is there any scientific ground for that blessedness? None whatsoever! If scientific progress in economics lies in our ability to tell ‘better and better stories’ one would, of course, expect economics journals to be filled with articles supporting the stories with empirical evidence confirming the predictions. However, the...

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts defending historical presentism, that is, the view that we should examine events and actors in history (at least in modern history) in the light of our current concerns, rather than treating them as exempt from any standards except those that prevailed (in the dominant class) at the time. Those posts referred to controversies within the history profession. Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the US, they have now been embroiled in the...

from Asad Zaman The two World Wars in the 20th century depleted the gold stocks of European governments and made a return to the (UK Sterling based) gold standard impossible. This led to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, where leaders of the world came together to find an alternative, non-gold-based, global trading system. John Maynard Keynes brought a proposal for a symmetric trading system, but it was rejected in favor of the dollar standard, which transferred global hegemony from...

from Dean Baker Outlawing items such as marijuana or alcohol invariably leads to black markets and corruption. Since there is much money to be made by selling these products in violation of the law, many people will follow the money and break the law. They will also corrupt the legal system in the process, making payments to people in law enforcement and elsewhere in the legal system. The old line from economists on this problem is to take the money out, by making marijuana and alcohol...

from Blair Fix We’re now in a position to look at the changing ideological landscape that is written in the English language. To quantify ideological change, I measure how the frequency of biblical/economics jargon has changed with time in the Google English corpus. Figure 10 shows my results. Here the blue line shows the annual frequency of biblical jargon. The red line shows the annual frequency of economics jargon. Note that the frequency is expressed per thousand words, so you can...

Open thread Jan. 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com

from Lars Syll The mainstream textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way, the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio. In his Macroeconomics — just to...