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John Taylor edited the new 2000+ pages plus ‘Handbook of macro-economics’, effectively a ‘Handbook of neoclassical macroeconomics’. Neoclassical economics is known for its illicit use of garbled language which hides and convolutes instead of explains. As the title of the book exemplifies. An interesting example is the chapter by Edward Prescott, titled ‘RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory’ (ungated version). Let’s first give the floor to him (emphasis added),...

from David Ruccio According to Oxfam’s analysis of data produced by Credit Suisse (which I analyzed in a different manner late last year), 42 billionaires now own the same wealth as the bottom half—3.7 billion people—of the world’s population.  Together, those 3.7 billion people own only one half of one percent (0.53 percent) of the world’s wealth, a figure that rises to just about one percent (0.96 percent) when net debt is excluded. In 2017, 42 billionaires on the Forbes billionaires...

from Norbert Häring The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney has at least two things in common with Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB): He worked for Goldman Sachs before becoming a central banker, and he is a member of the Group of Thirty. The EU-Ombudsman has just called it maladministration on the part of the ECB to let Mario Draghi be a member of that secretive bankers’ club. This should invite the question: What about Mark Carney and the Bank of...

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...

from Asad Zaman Pride resulting from global dominance and spectacular scientific and technological developments led Europeans to believe that the West was the most advanced and developed of all societies. Other societies were primitive and under-developed. As these other societies matured and grew, they would follow the same stages that were followed by the West, and eventually become like modern Western societies. Early thinkers like Comte described the stages in growth from primitive...

from Lars Syll Econometrics … is an undoubtedly flawed paradigm. Even putting aside the myriad of technical issues with misspecification and how these can yield results that are completely wrong, after seeing econometric research in practice I have become skeptical of the results it produces. Reading an applied econometrics paper could leave you with the impression that the economist (or any social science researcher) first formulated a theory, then built an empirical test based on the...

Eurostat made new data on broad unemployment available. For some countries (Ireland, Greece, Switzerland), these show a less rosy picture than the ‘normal’ unemployment data. Only the Czech Republic has low normal as well as low broad unemployment though Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria (!) and Germany seem to be heading that way. Altogether, labor slack is still immense. At this moment, wage increases are still low in non-Eastern European countries. Considering the slack this might stay so for...

from Donald MacKenzie and the London Review of Books The VIX, or Volatility Index, is Wall Street’s fear gauge. I first started paying attention to it in the late 1990s. Back then, a level of around 20 seemed normal. If the index got to 30, that was an indication of serious market unease; over 40 signalled a crisis. The highest the VIX ever got was during the 1987 stockmarket crash, when it reached 150. In the 2008 global banking crisis, it peaked at just below 90. The US economy has...