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from Lars Syll There has always been some level of scepticism about the ability of economists to offer meaningful predictions and prognosis about economic and social phenomenon. That scepticism has heightened in the wake of the global financial crisis, leading to what is arguably the biggest credibility crisis the discipline has faced in the modern era. Some of the criticisms against economists are misdirected. But the major thrust of the criticisms does have bite. There are seven key...

from Peter Radford Allow me to break my silence for a moment and comment on David Brook’s latest apology for the status quo. I realize others have already done so, but I feel compelled to add to the discussion. First: by way of explanation for my absence. I have been busy elsewhere, and especially busy looking at the future of the workplace. Second: it is because of this detour that I want to take a shot at Brooks. Let’s recapitulate Brook’s argument. He takes a look at the last couple of...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes out the cheap, refillable kind. Who can afford to live there? But wait! Those refurbished old...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes out the cheap, refillable kind. Who can afford to live there? But wait! Those refurbished old...

from Caroline Freund When I was an undergraduate studying economics in the 1980s, I got an early lesson in how men view women in the workforce. I was writing a thesis about the well-known phenomenon of women being paid less than men for the same jobs. One of my professors challenged the basic premise that bias was a possible reason for the wage gap. If women really did get paid less for the same work, he argued, a smart company would hire all women and undercut its competitors. No...

from Lars Syll A typical modern approach to writing a paper in DSGE macroeconomics is as follows: o to establish “stylized facts” about the quantitative interrelationships of certain macroeconomic variables (e.g. moments of the data such as variances, autocorrelations, covariances, …) that have hitherto not been jointly explained; o to write down a DSGE model of an economy subject to a defined set of shocks that aims to capture the described interrelationships; and o to show that the...

from Robert Locke Recently there has been a spate of postings and comments in the rwer blog about economics as science; they invariably deal with the relative degree of autism of orthodox economics along the lines that originally spawned the post-autistic economics movement, the rwer and the blog. The subject debated is the relative failure of an economics discipline based on the behavior of individuals in markets to guide policy formulation in the real world. For historians the birth of...

Here’s a fascinating graph from an article in the Lancet: Click to embiggen. (The figure should show deaths all the way to >95 years) The graph is a bit complicated at first, but it will convey some interesting information if you stare at it. What jumps out at me is how many more people were dying under age 25 in 1990 than in 2016. The number of deaths in 2016 v. 1990 increased dramatically for those above 25, particularly among the older cohorts....

United States Code Title 18 § 227 #TakeAKnee