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Last week (6/7/2023) I was invited to give an interview in IRIB’s news (Iranian national tv) on the protests in France after the police killing of a teen of migrant origin. The link for the video of the interview follows. Unfortunately it is in Farsi. The essence of my comments can be found in a previous written interview in PressTV (https://stavrosmavroudeas.wordpress.com/2023/07/01/s-mavroudeas-weak-unpopular-macron-using-military-means-to-quell-protests-interview-in-presstv/)...

from Steve Keen and RWER issue 104 The 6th edition of Mankiw’s Macroeconomics textbook (there’s now a 9th edition, but I’m not about to waste money buying a dead parrot) passes on the Money Multiplier Fairy Story by telling students to consider “an imaginary economy” in which the money supply is initially $100 in cash. Then, the population deposits all that cash in “First National Bank”. The money supply now consists of $100 in bank deposits, while all the cash is in the vault of First...

from Lars Syll Yours truly’s latest book has made it onto Amazon’s lists of best sellers in economics and econometrics. I am — of course — truly awed, honoured and delighted.

as often happens, I felt moved to reply to the e-mail that Noah Smith blasts out. On my PhD supervisor Larry Summers to whom I owe a debt I can never repay: who the fuck cares about inflation ? Answer: everyone but for opposite reasons. Economists think that, in the long run, inflation does not effect real quantities except for menu costs and shoe leather costs. Economists estimate those costs to be almost exactly zero. Then economists say...

In my early days of following Angry Bear, there was a climate change denialist troll whose handle was “CoRev.” Most of the stuff CoRev posted was standard denialist fare that had been debunked. At the time, one favorite denialist claim was the “hiatus,” a period between 2001 and 2014 during which warming seemed to “pause.” This, according to CoRev and like-minded denialists, was scientific evidence that climate change was a hoax. Part of the...

– but this dream has failed before. My latest in The Conversation over the fold Last week, opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to join what he dubbed the “international nuclear energy renaissance”. The same phrase was used 20 years ago to describe plans for a massive expansion of nuclear. New Generation III plants would be safer and more efficient than the Generation II plants built in the 1970s and 1980s. But the supposed renaissance delivered only a trickle...

from John Komlos and RWER issue 104 . . . for the first 97 percent of our species’ history, humans did not compete for status by amassing economic and political power and thus such inequality cannot be viewed as socially necessary. Such competition was proscribed because it would be destructive of these societies’ collective well-being. Instead, their rules of the game compelled them to compete in other manners beneficial to the community, such as by being good warriors, good hunters and...

from Lars Syll According to Keynes, financial crises are a recurring feature of our economy and are linked to its fundamental financial instability: It is of the nature of organised investment markets, under the influence of purchasers largely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market sentiment than with a reasonable estimate of the future yield of capital-assets, that, when disillusion falls upon an...

In humans, the traits of high intelligence and good judgment are unlinked. There are many such examples; viz:• Kary Mullis, who won for co-inventing the technique behind PCR testing, went on to deny that HIV causes AIDS, helping to sway South African president Thabo Mbeki into rejecting antiretroviral therapy, costing hundreds of thousands of lives;• Linus Pauling went from two-time Nobelist to full-time quack, a brilliant peace activist and...

from http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue104/Fichtner_Morgan104.pdf The Institutional Investor publishes an annual league table of top hedge fund managers earnings. The latest data at time of interview was from March 2022 and reported that “Altogether, the 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers earned a combined $26.64 billion last year, the second-highest amount in the history of the Rich List… Over the past two years, the members of the Rich List’s First Team have made more than $58...