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Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Irresistible Force meets Immovable Object

I’ll be presenting a talk at the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society conference. Title Irresistible Force* meets Immovable Object** * Massive expansion in production of low-cost solar PV ** Entrenched resistance to deployment. Shorter JQ: Irresistible force will win in the end Presentation is here Share this:Like Loading...

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Mainstream economics — an explanatory disaster

from Lars Syll To achieve explanatory success, a theory should, minimally, satisfy two criteria: it should have determinate implications for behavior, and the implied behavior should be what we actually observe. These are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. Rational-choice theory often fails on both counts. The theory may be indeterminate, and people may be irrational. In what was perhaps the first sustained criticism of the theory, Keynes emphasized indeterminacy, notably because...

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Weekend read – Neoliberal angst?

from Peter Radford I wonder why it is that neoliberals so reject the label we have given them.  Is it because they’e embarrassed?  I don’t think so.  They all seem very proud of their attachment to the old order.  Every so often one of them will surface and proclaim bitterly that they are misunderstood and they they don’t deserve the opprobrium piled on them by those nasty “leftists” who want to sully the pristine reputations of people like Mises and Hayek.  Poor dears.  Are we to feel...

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The end of maritime power

Noah Smith has posted an interesting interview with Sarah Paine who looks at the distinction between maritime powers (in modern history, Britain and the US) and continental powers (everyone else). Paine sees maritime powers as beneficent creators and upholders of a peaceful and rules-based international order It’s a distinction I’ve discussed in the past, but with very different views. Here’s a full-length response The maritime/continental distinction is crucial, but not in the...

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Basics of Monetary Economies

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedological Blog . . . conventional modern textbooks of economics do not correctly describe monetary economies.. . .  For instance, a popular textbook by Mankiw states that: . . . I am planning to write a textbook on monetary economies. I will draft it section by section and chapter by chapter, and put down the drafts here for feedback and comments. The first section is given below – it is an introduction to the topic, and provides some motivation for the study,...

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A future threat has become a present reality and time is against us

from Jamie Morgan and RWER issue 106 ‘How can we construct an economics consistent with the biophysical limits to economic growth?’. As any ecological economist is aware, this is a foundational issue not an afterthought chapter tacked on to the end of a textbook or delegated to a sub-disciplinary specialist who can ‘deal with that for us’. Doing either of those has been part of the problem. Mainstream economics takes as its primary focus the microeconomics of price signalling in systems...

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Econometric modeling and inference

from Lars Syll The impossibility of proper specification is true generally in regression analyses across the social sciences, whether we are looking at the factors affecting occupational status, voting behavior, etc. The problem is that as implied by the three conditions for regression analyses to yield accurate, unbiased estimates, you need to investigate a phenomenon that has underlying mathematical regularities – and, moreover, you need to know what they are. Neither seems true … Even...

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The Roaring 20s II : This Time It’s Fiscal

In the Washington Post David Lynch (no not that David Lynch) reports that “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery.” lternative titles Handling the blue team with velvet gloves (not used as it alleges bias when the article merely reports the facts without Ballance (TM) for once) Twin Peaks (inflation and GDP not used as it might invite a downturn and I am superstitious) The excellent article (just click...

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Houthis In Charge Here

This is mainly belated comentary on “How a Ragtag Militia in Yemen Became a Nimble U.S. Foe” I think there are lessons to be learned from the success of the Houthi militia in Yemen. The lesson I learn is the lesson I claim to have learned again and again — most US defence spending is wasted, because a huge amount is spent on expensive platforms rather than on smart munitions launched from lots of cheap platforms (drones and missiles...

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