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Crooked Timber, the group blog of which I’m a member turns 20 today. Here’s a post I’ve written to mark the occasion. Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence. Looking back at posts from that time, it’s startling how active we were; with multiple posts most days. That’s ebbed away to...

from Dean Baker The media are really going overboard in telling us the days of the free market are over with Biden’s new economic policies. President Biden has quite explicitly implemented policies intended to reshape the direction of the economy, pushing clean energy and more domestic production of advanced semiconductors and other products. He also has reinvigorated anti-trust policy, which was largely shelved by his predecessors. But the idea that the policies of the last four decades...

The Kakhovka dam was a massive two-mile-long structure that dammed the Dnieper River which bisects Ukraine. It was built by the Soviet Union in 1956 and raised the Dnieper by 16 meters (52 feet), creating the Kakhovka Reservoir. The dam was destroyed on 6 June 2023, resulting in massive flooding downstream on both sides of […]

Please click here to support this journal and the WEA RWER Issue no. 104download whole issue The Dead Parrot of Mainstream EconomicsSteve Keen 2 Why Hedge Funds Matter: An interview with Jan FichtnerJan Fichtner and Jamie Morgan 17 ETF shares as shadow moneyAlexandru-Stefan Goghie 49 The Dollar Centric Financial System and the Conflict in UkraineMarcello Spanò 67 A Note on Teaching Economic InequalityJunaid B. Jahangir 75 Book Review: Muhammad Ali Nasir, Off the Target: The Stagnating...

from Jayati Ghosh Abstract The title of this article is a riff off a publication of G. C. Harcourt’s 1974 piece, ‘The social consequences of inflation’. He wrote this in a period of the global economy that bears some strong similarities to our own contemporary phase when inflation is suddenly back in the global headlines. There is at least one significant difference: at that time, Harcourt highlighted inflation as the outcome of an excess of total demand in real terms over available...

from Lars Syll [Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of.  John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of” — showing the certainty of logical entailment — realiter simply collapsing the necessary ontological gap...

from Maria Alejandra Madi Regarding Western democracies, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard scholars, think that the answer is yes. They base their answer on decades of study and a wide range of historical and modern cases, from 1930s Europe to modern Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, North and South America. Instead of a revolution or a military takeover, the authors believe that there will be a steady and slow breakdown of long-standing democratic rules and institutions. For...

from Dean Baker Of course, the New York Times did not headline a piece this way, but that would have been a more accurate headline of an article it ran last weekend discussing a turn away from “neo-liberal” policies. As I pointed out in a quick Twitter thread, that piece misrepresented a set of policies that have the effect of redistributing income upward as “free market” policies. This is wrong in a way that is very convenient for the proponents of these policies. The massive upward...

from Maria Alejandra Madi and WEA Pedeaogy Blog Podcasts, which can now be easily accessed online, have had a recent surge in popularity, which may be attributed to their convenience. These podcasts discuss a wide range of topics that are related to the professional and academic spheres. The issue that naturally emerges is what exactly makes it qualified to be regarded as a scholarship approach. To put this another way, what exactly is it about this method that qualifies it to be used as...

Hard to describe how depressed I am feeling about Australian politics right now. The Voice Referendum was always going to be a longshot because referendums usually fail. But Albanese’s refusal to put forward a model, and the promotion of someone as abrasive as Noel Pearson as a leading advocate risk a defeat so bad that the fallback of option of a legislated Voice is unlikely. In economic terms, Australians will be worse off by the next election than when Labor was elected –...