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from Lars Syll Fifty years ago Milton Friedman wrote an (in)famous article arguing that (1) the natural rate of unemployment was independent of monetary policy, and (2) trying to keep the unemployment rate below the natural rate would only give rise to higher and higher inflation. The hypothesis has always been controversial, and much theoretical and empirical work has questioned the real-world relevance of the ideas that unemployment really is independent of monetary policy and that...

from Peter Radford Hayek says this: “The problem which we pretend [to] solve is how the spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs, etc., and which could be brought about by deliberate direction only by somebody who possesses the combined knowledge of all those individuals … “ This is from his essay ‘Economics and Knowledge’ which was published in 1937. Hayek’s thrust is, of...

from Asad Zaman Summary: My 1000+ word summary of Polanyi’s classic: “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times” has been wildly popular, remaining constantly among the top ten on the RWER Blog since it was was published nearly five years ago.  I have recently (25/12/26) revised and updated the post to clean up extraneous elements and clarify the substance in light of readers comments as well as my own improved understanding. Perhaps the most important...

from David Ruccio Yesterday, I discussed the mean-spiritedness of the Republican tax cuts—which are being sold as a gift to the middle-class but, in reality, represent a massive transfer to a small group of large corporations and wealthy individuals. But, of course, the real violence associated with the tax-cut gift occurs before federal taxes are even levied, in the pre-tax distribution of income. As is clear from the chart above, since the mid-1970s, the share of income captured by...

from Lars Syll Larry Elliott wrote a Guardian article the other day criticizing mainstream economics, arguing that we should stop treating economics as a science because it is nothing of the sort. A proper science involves testing a hypothesis against the available evidence. If the evidence doesn’t support the theory, a physicist or a biologist will discard the theory and try to come up one that does work empirically. Economics doesn’t work like that. Theories can be shown to work only by...

K-12 Student Loan Industry By MaryAnn Schlegel Ruegger  via AlterNet: The GOP tax bill’s inclusion of 529 plans for K-12 private tuition has been widely criticized as yet one more provision that aids the wealthy. That’s because only wealthy families have enough money on hand to sock away $10,000 a year toward each child’s K-12 private school tuition…. … The 529 provision in the tax bill is more than anything else a boon to the growing K-12 private school...

From a Department of Energy report entitled Revolution… Now; The Future Arrives for Five Clean Energy Technologies – 2016 Update a nifty graph: (click to embiggen) If the graph is remotely accurate, these are large cost reductions. Accompanying the graph is this verbage: Decades of investments by the federal government and industry in five key clean energy technologies are making an impact today. The cost of land-based wind power, utility and distributed...

Same store sales doing a lot better than last year: Confidence remains high: Housing, however, still seems to be going nowhere: Highlights The pending home sales index has been flat and has not been in line with the strength of final sales of existing homes. This may limit the impact of today’s report where the November index managed only a 0.2 percent gain to a 109.5 level that is still below last year’s levels. In contrast, existing home sales, at a 5.810 million...

I am going to make a fool of myself by suggesting that a cryptocurrency might actually be useful. Bitcoin et al have negative social utility. They are pure speculative assets which enable people to gamble. Also bitcoin miners use as much electricity as Denmark. The problem is exactly the aspect which has made bitcoin famous and which bitcoin enthusiasts consider a strength — the enormous increase in the dollar price of bitcoin. This increase, and the...