Tag Archives: Uncategorized

 New book from WEA Books At the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 and the lockdown practices imposed worldwide generated a global economic crisis that challenges the traditional explanations of economic downturns .  Like the economic crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was systemic and global, and this collection of essays examines it in a broad geographical and historical context. Kindle $6.00                  Paperback $14.99Amazon US   UK   FR  DE   IN ...

from Lars Syll Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference functions so that they are “other-regarding”. But even with these modified...

My latest in The Conversation via my Substack If you believe Newspoll and the Australian Financial Review, Australia wants to go nuclear – as long it’s small. Newspoll this week suggests a majority of us are in favour of building small modular nuclear reactors. A poll of Australian Financial Review readers last year told a similar story. These polls (and a more general question about nuclear power in a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers this week) come after a concerted effort...

Pavlina R.Tchemevra is the source of the data for this chart which appeared in September 2014 in the New York Times in an article by Neil Irwin “The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans”.  Can anyone source or provide an updated version of this chart?  

There is no ‘tragedy of the Commons.’ But a tragedy of the absence of Commons-as organizations, let’s call it ‘the tragedy of uncommons’, does exist. Below, I will provide the example of the island of Ameland in the Northern Netherlands, in line with the historical examples of successful Commons mentioned by Elinor Ostrom (especially those for Switzerland).  Ownership is a multi-dimensional concept. Up to the 1795 revolution, the island of Ameland, north of Friesland, was not a part...

from Maria Alejandra Madi and RWER issue 106 Complexity is characteristic of a system that preserves the differentiation among its constituent elements while also preserving their identity. Complexity also implies dynamic systems, that is to say, open totalities of interrelated parts constantly changing in spacetime. The complexity of a system is related to the coexistence of intertwined parts in spacetime and complexity is intrinsic to real-world natural, economic and social processes...

from Lars Syll Mainstream economists have always wanted to use their hammer, and so have decided to pretend that the world looks like a nail. Pretending that uncertainty can be reduced to risk and that all activities, relations, processes, and events can be adequately converted to pure numbers, have only contributed to making economics irrelevant and powerless when confronting real-world financial crises and economic havoc. How do we put an end to this intellectual cataclysm? How do we...

Managers need to recognise that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise My latest in Inside Story Authority is powerful yet intangible. The capacity to give an order and expect it to be obeyed may rest ultimately on a threat to sanction those who disobey but it can rarely survive large-scale disobedience. The modern era has seen many kinds of traditional authority come under challenge, but until now the “right of managers to manage” has remained largely...

from Richard Parker and RWER issue 106 Back in the late 1960s, a tiny band of unconventional economists encountered an environmentalism in the midst of radical rethinking. Prompted by Carson’s Silent Spring, capitalism and its science were being accused of major crimes—against nature, our fellow species and humankind itself.  Hiroshima had shattered confidence in the benignity of Progress, especially Progress through Markets and Corporate Science.  Now that skepticism looked around...

My latest in The Guardian Just two weeks after Prof Allan Fels reported on the extent of monopoly power and resultant price gouging, Australia’s supreme body on competition law has delivered its answer. The Australian competition tribunal has determined that the banking industry has all the competition we need and that no harm will be done by allowing ANZ to swallow one of the few competitors to the Big Four by acquiring the banking operations of Suncorp. This was the latest in a...