Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from David Ruccio Mainstream economists have been taking quite a beating in recent years. They failed, in the first instance, with respect to the spectacular crash of 2007-08. Not only did they not predict the crash, they didn’t even include the possibility of such an event in their models. Nor, of course, did they have much to offer in terms of explanations of why it occurred or appropriate policies once it did happen. More recently, the advice of mainstream economists has been...

After my recent post on police shootings I was curious and did some googling on the topic. By coincidence, right about that time Peter Moskos (i.e., Cop in the Hood) wrote this: I looked at the Washington Post data of those shot and killed by police in 2015 and 2016 and broke it down by states with more and fewer African-Americans. States that are more than 10 percent African American include 21 states plus D.C. (198 million people, 18 percent black, 36...

from Asad Zaman In response to a comment by David Chester regarding Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand, I am reproducing the section in the paper which deals with this issue. This answers his question about how what is attributed to Adam Smith differs from what he actually said. [Excerpt from the paper: Failures of the Invisible Hand] Section 6: Recent Vintage of the Invisible Hand The main goal of this section is to show that the modern interpretation of the IH is relatively recent. The...

Trumped up expectations as reflected in the various surveys continue to fade, and fall in line with the decelerating ‘hard data’: Highlights There finally may be cracks appearing in Philly Fed which has, since the election, been signaling break-out strength for the Mid-Atlantic manufacturing sector. The general conditions index looks solid at 19.5, still very strong though down from 27.6 in June and the least robust result since November. But details — which in this report...

from Lars Syll Most mainstream economists are reluctant to have a methodological discussion. They usually think it’s too ‘risky.’ Well, maybe it is. But on the other hand, if we’re not prepared to take that risk, economics can’t progress, as Tony Lawson forcefully argues in his Essays on the Nature and State of Modern Economics: Twenty common myths and/or fallacies of modern economics 1. The widely observed crisis of the modern economics discipline turns on problems that originate at the...

from Peter Radford OK, let me get back to it: I have just read a set of short papers over at a journal aptly named Democracy. The papers are held together under the banner:Symposium: has Economics Failed Us? Naturally that question was sufficient to get my attention, but reading through the material was so depressing. Why? Because there was Jason Furman offering a defense that has all the hallmarks of an economics profession steadfastly denying its own reality. Dean Baker was brilliant in...

from David Ruccio The effects of climate change are, as we know, distributed unequally across locations. Therefore, the damages from climate change—in terms of agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—are expected to increase world inequality, by generating a large transfer of value northward and westward from poor to rich countries. What about within countries—specifically, the United States? A new report, published in Science, predicts the United States...

Better than expected, but not enough to reverse this year’s downtrend, as per the chart, and housing is adding less to q2 gdp than it did to q1 gdp: Highlights Housing data have been up and down and are now back up as both housing starts and permits easily beat Econoday’s top estimates. Starts jumped 8.3 percent in June to a 1.215 million annualized rate with permits up 7.4 percent to a 1.254 million rate. As weak as the details were in the prior report is how strong they...

from Lars Syll Contrary to the tenets of orthodox economists, contemporary research suggests that, rather than seeking always to maximise our personal gain, humans still remain reasonably altruistic and selfless. Nor is it clear that the endless accumulation of wealth always makes us happier. And when we do make decisions, especially those to do with matters of principle, we seem not to engage in the sort of rational “utility-maximizing” calculus that orthodox economic models take as a...