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from Dean Baker I would agree with pretty much all of Paul Krugman’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s trade war with China, but I would strongly disagree with one of his criticisms of China. He tells readers: “In some ways, China really is a bad actor in the global economy. In particular, it has pretty much thumbed its nose at international rules on intellectual property rights, grabbing foreign technology without proper payment.” The issue here is who set the rules and what is proper...

from David Ruccio 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, just days after joining a march of thousands of African-American protestors down Beale Street, one of the major commercial thoroughfares in Memphis, Tennessee. King and the other marchers were demonstrating their support for 1300 striking sanitation workers, many of whom held placards that proclaimed, “Union Justice Now!” and “I Am a Man.”  The night before his assassination, King told the striking sanitation...

1. What are the major flaws you see within Modern Monetary Theory? (A) I like to say that MMT is a mix of “old” and “new” ideas. The old ideas are well known among Keynesian economists and are correct, but the new ideas are either misleading or wrong. The essential old idea, which everybody knows, is [...]

from Lars Syll The efficient market hypothesis — EMH — argues there is no free lunch and prices are ‘right.’ Well, as we all know, that is not true. Noise does influence asset prices and the law of one price is blatantly violated again and again. Of course, THERE ARE IDIOTS, as Larry Summers once (in)famously put it. When visiting Chicago, look around … The price is often wrong, and sometimes very wrong … If policy-makers simply take it as a matter of faith that prices are always right,...

from Peter Radford There’s a bold rolling down the hill. We are watching it carefully. It is accelerating. It is enormous. It will mow us down. Lives will be lost. Or at least livelihoods will be lost. People will suffer. The boulder is terrifying. But, hey, let’s keep watching. That’s about the attitude of the people who keep on talking about the imminent tsunami of automation, AI, and other so-called disruptive technologies. Let’s keep watching because it’s bad — really, really, bad....

from Dean Baker Donald Trump has proved the skeptics wrong, it seems that the American people stand to be big winners as a result of his trade war. The Chinese government announced a major initiative to promote the manufacture and use of generic drugs. The reason this is potentially a big deal for the United States is that it could mean that China intends to push the envelope in replacing drugs protected by government-granted patent monopolies with drugs sold at free market prices. While...

from Lars Syll Balliol Croft, Cambridge 27. ii. 06 My dear Bowley, I have not been able to lay my hands on any notes as to Mathematico-economics that would be of any use to you: and I have very indistinct memories of what I used to think on the subject. I never read mathematics now: in fact I have forgotten even how to integrate a good many things. But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic...

from C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh In discussions of global inequality, there is general agreement that, whatever else may have happened, within-country inequality has increased in most cases, even as between-country inequality has come down. But overall, because of the recent emergence of countries with large populations like China and India, there has actually been some reduction in global inequality, because of increasing incomes in the  “middle” of the global distribution. Chart...

“I apprehend that bank notes, bills, or cheques, as such, do not act on prices at all. What does act on prices is Credit, in whatever shape given, and whether it gives rise to any transferable instruments capable of passing into circulation or not.” John Stuart Mill, 1848 “The relation of changes in M (money) to Y (income) and r (the interest rate) depends, in the first instance, on the way in which changes in M come about.” John Maynard Keynes, 1936 John Cochrane has an interesting post...