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This was published on the PRIME site on the 25th February, 2018. Britain is led today by deeply divided political parties. Our leaders have many policies, but no inspiring vision for Britain’s future – either within, or outside the EU. As President Roosevelt once famously said: “where there is no vision, the people perish”. The peoples of the European Union do have a vision – the pursuit of peace and stability across the continent on the basis of European values (including the maintenance...

This was published on the PRIME site on the 25th February, 2018. Britain is led today by deeply divided political parties. Our leaders have many policies, but no inspiring vision for Britain’s future – either within, or outside the EU. As President Roosevelt once famously said: “where there is no vision, the people perish”. The peoples of the European Union do have a vision – the pursuit of peace and stability across the continent on the basis of European values (including the...

from Lars Syll There is something about the way economists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics still has not given way to methodological pluralism based on ontological considerations (rather than formalistic tractability). In their search for model-based rigour and certainty, ‘modern’ economics has turned out to be a...

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Broad unemployment today is, compared with the period before 1994, worse than you think. A new way of estimating ‘part time workers for economic reasons’ shifted this series downward with almost 1% of the labor force. To gain a proper understanding of historical developments present day data have to be increased or historical data have to be decreased a little.  I’m trying to write a book about the relation between economic statistics and neoclassical...

2017

from David Ruccio Economic inequality is arguably the crucial issue facing contemporary capitalism—especially in the United States but also across the entire world economy.   Over the course of the last four decades, income inequality has soared in the United States, as the share of pre-tax national income captured by the top 1 percent (the red line in the chart above) has risen from 10.4 percent in 1976 to 20.2 percent in 2014. For the world economy as a whole, the top 1-percent share...

from Edward Fullbrook Norbert Häring’s story about misleading academic research reminds me of another story. Big-money offering bribes to academics is, I suspect, more common than people, including academics, realize.  I first encountered the practice when I was an undergraduate.  My university’s most popular course, “Insurance”, was taught by an economics professor whose students affectionately called Doc Elliot.  He taught not only how the insurance industry purported to work, but also...

from Norbert Häring For international readers, I would like to summarize a piece on false economic research supporting tuition fees, which appeared in German in Handelsblatt on 19 February. As interesting as the fake research itself is the differing reactions of the two main channels, which had been used to publicize it: One was the prestigious Working Paper series of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US The other was the well-read platform Vox (voxeu.org) of the...

from Lars Syll In my view, scientific theories are not to be considered ‘true’ or ‘false.’ In constructing such a theory, we are not trying to get at the truth, or even to approximate to it: rather, we are trying to organize our thoughts and observations in a useful manner. Robert Aumann What a handy view of science. How reassuring for all of you who have always thought that believing in the tooth fairy make you understand what happens to kids’ teeth. Now a ‘Nobel prize’ winning...