Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Peter Radford I have been reminded by Tyler Cowen of Bryan Caplan’s simplistic theory of left and right.  It’s short and to the point.  Leftists are, he says, “anti-market”. He is wrong. Leftists are anti-market obsession.  They are anti-market fanaticism.  They are anti-market worship.  Specifically, they are opposed to the form of idealization used to articulate “the market” in economics. There’s a difference.  And I assume Bryan Caplan knows as much. There has been a recent...

Open Thread April 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

from Dean Baker Last week, David Brooks had a column that was quite literally a celebration of American capitalism. He makes a number of points showing the U.S. doing better than other wealthy countries over the last three decades. While his numbers are not exactly wrong, they are somewhat misleading. (I see Paul Krugman beat me to the punch, so I’ll try not to be completely redundant.) Brooks points to the faster GDP growth in the United States than in other wealthy countries. As Krugman...

from Asad Zaman  This is the first of a sequence of posts on the current economic crisis in Pakistan. Although the discussion is in the context of Pakistan, all the poor countries in grips of the modern neo-colonial global system face essentially the same problems. The financial basis of the system is outlined by Jason Hickel in Aid-in-Reverse: How the Poor Countries Develop the Rich. He describes how the poor countries receive 1.3 Trillion USD in financial inflows, aid, etc. from the...

Open Thread April 20, 2023, Angry Bear angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

from Lars Syll A couple of years ago, Paul Krugman had a piece up on his blog arguing that the ‘discipline of modelling’ is a sine qua non for tackling politically and emotionally charged economic issues: In my experience, modeling is a helpful tool (among others) in avoiding that trap, in being self-aware when you’re starting to let your desired conclusions dictate your analysis. Why? Because when you try to write down a model, it often seems to lead some place you weren’t expecting or...

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about relative economic performance of the EU and US as well as (mostly separately) discussion of differences in mortality rates. One way to integrate the two is to think of living in the US as a (very) dangerous occupation, and think about the wage premium demanded by workers to take up such occupations, relative to comparable low-risk jobs. The typical estimate from econometric studies is that a 0.1 per cent chance of death on the job (a...

from Dean Baker  It is standard for politicians, reporters, and columnists to refer to the United States as the world’s largest economy and China as the second largest. I suppose this assertion is good for these people’s egos, but it happens not to be true. Measuring by purchasing power parity, China’s economy passed the U.S. in 2014, and it is now roughly 25 percent larger.[1] The I.M.F. projects that China’s economy will be nearly 40 percent larger by 2028, the last year in its...

With the release of the Labor government’s Electric Vehicle policy and the Reserve Bank Review, as well as my semi-regular column for Independent Australia, I’ve been pretty busy this week. I haven’t got time to summarise them now, so I will just provide links. Quiggin, J. (2023) Electric vehicles: Time to get out of the slow lane. Inside Story 20 April, Quiggin, J. (2023) The RBA review ignores the global failure of inflation management to prevent financial chaos. The Guardian...

from Asad Zaman  and RWER current issue The intimate connection between economic theory and political power is clearly illustrated by the rise and fall of Keynesian Economics in the 20th Century. Confidence generated by theories glorifying the workings of a market economy led leading economists to predict permanent prosperity, just prior to the Great Depression of 1929. After the crash, Keynes set out to resolve the most glaring contradiction between economic theory and reality. While...