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from Lars Syll On Black Friday 1929 market fundamentalist wet dreams of eternal growth took a serious hit. The stock market bubble exploded and crashed. Today​ we have a stock market situation much reminding of that in 1929. The Shiller P/E ratio is now even higher than that year. Those of us who know our Keynes-Fisher-Kindleberger-Minsky and have not completely forgotten all about economic​ history are starting to worry …

from Edward Fullbrook The current issue (January 8, 2018) of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter lists the current issues of 16 English language journals, with each linked to the newsletter’s website where there is a link for each article in these new issues.  For each journal, I picked one article to try to read.  Here is what I found.  Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 35B Lucia Morra: Friendship and Intellectual Intercourse Between Sraffa and Wittgenstein: A...

In 1921 King, Macaulay and Mitchell published their milestone ‘Income in the United States: Its Amount and Distribution, 1909-1919’ which estimated time series of nominal and real income in the USA. Why did they measure this? The last sentence of their introduction reads: “Last but most interesting of all, we shall consider the way in which the National Income is distributed among individuals”. Distribution was paramount. The authors were also well aware of the limited nature of their...

from Gustavo Marqués If it is assumed that (a) both agents and theorists are aware they are facing an uncertain context, and (b) they hold epistemic and ontological beliefs consistent with this state of affairs, the proper way to approach economic phenomena should be very different from those that guide current modeling practice. Particularly, instead of mechanisms or economic regularities that keep running independently of agents’ expectations, the decisive role of lobbyists within...

From the World Economic Forum: Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year. She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in the United States. Kardashian’s aim was to highlight how many more Americans are killed by fellow citizens with guns, than by...

from Dean Baker The soaring price of Bitcoin is a useful lesson about markets for people who seem to very quickly forget the last lesson. Bitcoin, a digital algorithm, backed by absolutely nothing, has been selling for more than $16,000. Perhaps Bitcoin’s price will double or triple again. After all, who knows how badly people need digital currencies that are not really currencies? But more likely the market will run out of people who are willing to trade real money for nothing. At that...

In 1898 Thorstein Veblen asked ‘Why isn’t economics an evolutionary science?’. At the ASSA 2018 conference Avsar, Duroy and Scorsone mused about this. Below, the abstracts of their papers. Here, Mark Thomas about this. Avsar’s article is, with its link to neurology, truly Veblenian in spirit. An interesting question is: it seems that the behavior of hunter-gatherers, who have little property as they can’t carry it with them, have behavior that is more economic rational than the behavior...

from Lars Syll It has been more than eight years since many of the United States’ cashiers, dishwashers, janitors, lifeguards, baggage handlers, baristas, manicurists, retail employees, housekeepers, construction laborers, home health aides, security guards, and other minimum-wage workers last got a raise. The federal minimum wage now stands at just $7.25. In real terms, these workers’ earnings have declined by nearly 13 percent since the last hike, in 2009—and have fallen by over...

Some (institutional) stuff from the ASSA conference, the first one with nice definitions of trust and control (but there might be more empirical stuff). The second one on the role of the ideology of judges in economic cases when there are no clear legal rules. More tomorrow. Claudius Gräbner, Johannes Kepler University-Linz Wolfram Elsner. To trust or to control: Informal value transfer systems and computational analysis in institutional economics Here, the PPT This paper illustrates the...