Tag Archives: Uncategorized

First blush, I would like to take McCarthy to the west side of Chicago on Madison Ave just west of where the Northwest Highway joins the Dan Ryan. Let him explain there why the people around there are expendable. I know the area well enough so as to keep out of it. This is a sellout. WASHINGTON, May 27 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and top congressional Republican Kevin McCarthy reached a tentative debt deal to suspend the federal...

Yesterday, I gave a presentation to the Canberra Security Economics Network. Central point: *Self-defence is special, military expenditure is not* Spelling this out *The need to defend the country against invasion, air attack or naval blockade involves existential risk Any other use of military power should be assessed in terms of (opportunity) costs and benefits Compared to alternative public or private expenditures Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Review of Power and Progress, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson from Dean Baker When I saw that two of the country’s most prominent economists wrote a book on “our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity,” I expected a lot. I was disappointed. To be clear, there is much here to like and I’m sure that most readers will get much from it, as I did. But, the book fails to follow through adequately on the key point in its analysis, which is that the gains from technology are a...

The Progressive Economics Forum holds its annual meetings at the Canadian Economics Association (CEA) conference, which we thank for its financial support. In this year’s CEA, we are also celebrating PEF’s 25th anniversary. This year’s CEA conference will be held in person on June 2-3, 2023 in Winnipeg. A day of online only sessions will be held in advance of the conference on Tuesday May 30, 2023. The CEA Embrace Day with workshops will be held on Thursday June 1. As usual, PEF is...

Open Thread May 16, 2023, Angry Bear, angry bear blog Tags: open thread

from Lars Syll Economic theory, like anthropology, ‘works’ by studying societies which are in some relevant sense simpler or more primitive than our own, in the hope either that relations that are important but hidden in our society will be laid bare in simpler ones, or that concrete evidence can be discovered for possibilities which are open to us which are without precedent in our own history. Unlike anthropologists, however, economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a...

from Asad Zaman In my article on “Education of an Economist”, I have explained how I gradually came to realize that all I had learnt during my Ph.D. training at Stanford University was false. I would like to make this more specific and concrete, by providing some examples. A leading example is a paper on Power and Taxes which I studied as a graduate student. But, let me start from the beginning. Leijonhufvud, in his classic “Life Among the Econ” explains how the priestly caste of the...

Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by annual income. To compute an estimate of the net benefits of a regulation using this approach, you first compute...

from Lars Syll American economist Hyman Minsky described capitalism as a “two price” system. On one side are asset prices—both financial, like government or corporate bonds, and physical like residential or commercial property. On the other, there are consumer prices—goods and services that determine current output and consumer price inflation. In the contemporary global economy, asset prices are much more sensitive to interest rate adjustments than consumer prices. The present value of...

Recently, Robert Lucas, who was called an economist, died. This is not about him, but about his kind of economics as tweets and obituaries show that it is not yet generally understood what kind of science the neoclassical macro-economist like him produced. Their most egregious failure: after decades of work, they do not even have a shimmer of anything which could pass for a neoclassical way to estimate the macro economy, even when their ideas are squarely at odds with the macro economy...