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We installed rooftop solar on our house in St. Louis ten years ago. Half of the cost was paid by Ameren and we got a 30% tax rebate on the balance. By the time we moved to Rhode Island last year and sold the house, we still hadn’t made back our investment even in nominal dollars. I’m OK with that, since at the time of installation, 80% of our electricity was generated by burning coal. Our donation to the planet.Rooftop solar was an object of...

from Dean Baker In some really big news that is likely to get almost no media attention, Senator Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate HELP Committee, negotiated a deal with Bill Cassidy, the ranking Republican, on a package of amendments to the reauthorization of the nation’s pandemic preparedness law. While there are a number of items in the deal, a really big one is funding for a study to be done by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to consider...

Volume 13, Issue 1download the whole issue Summary of the Great Transformation by PolanyiAsad Zaman Economics, Anthropology and the Origin of Money as a Bargaining CounterPatrick Spread “Capitalism is the most successful, but also the most destructive ideological-economic system.”An interview withLaibachMitja Stefancic Brainstorming: Negative Impact of EconomicsAsad Zaman Closing RemarksStuart Birks Please click here to support the World Economics Association

from Lars Syll Using ‘simplifying’ tractability or ‘heuristic’ assumptions — rational expectations, common knowledge, representative agents, linearity, additivity, ergodicity, etc — because otherwise they cannot ‘manipulate’ their models or come up with ‘rigorous ‘ and ‘precise’ predictions and explanations, does not exempt economists from having to justify their modelling choices. Being able to ‘manipulate’ things in models cannot per se be enough to warrant a methodological choice. If...

from Dean Baker I have a birthday coming up, so it seems a good time to assess progress, or lack thereof, on the various issues that I have worked on over the decades. There is some big progress in at least a couple of areas, but not much to boast about in the others. I’ll start with the success stories. The Benefits of a Tight Labor Market The big one, where I feel we really have made huge progress, is the battle for full employment. It might seem like ancient history, but a quarter...

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...