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My daughter gave me Emma Southon’s book “A fatal thing happened on the way to the forum” for Christmas. Apart from my longtime interest in history, there was a particular reason for this choice. Rebecca took five years of Latin in middle school and high school. She got a 5 on the Latin AP exam, which entitled her to college credit, although I’m not sure whether Colorado State awarded that credit on her transcript. Along the way, she learned 33 words...

from Blair Fix In my last post, I looked at the relation between economic growth and inflation. As per usual, the evidence didn’t sit well with mainstream economics. According to standard theory, there is a trade off between low inflation and high economic growth. The idea is that you can have one or the other, but not both. So if you want to keep inflation low, you have to ‘cool off’ the economy by slowing economic growth. (Like many things in economics, this idea comes from the totem of...

from Lars Syll As Oskar Morgenstern noted in his 1928 classic Wirtschaftsprognose: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten, economic predictions and forecasts amount to little more than intelligent guessing. Making forecasts and predictions obviously isn’t a trivial or costless activity, so why then go on with it? The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really underline how important it is for social sciences to incorporate Keynes’s...

The Prince of Providence was Vincent “Buddy” Cianci. Cianci grew up in Rhode Island. His father was a physician (a proctologist), so he grew up in privilege. He went to the right schools, although being of Italian descent, he came in for some ridicule in this ethnically Balkanized community. He got a law degree from Marquette University.When Cianci decided to run for mayor of Providence, he styled himself as the anti-corruption candidate, taking on...

Μνήμη V.Chick Την 15η Ιανουαρίου 2023 αποβίωσε στο Λονδίνο σε ηλικία 87 ετών η Victoria Chick, μία εμβληματική μορφή του μετα-Κεϋνσιανού ρεύματος. Γεννημένη στο Berkeley της Καλιφόρνια το 1936 σπούδασε Οικονομικά στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Καλιφόρνια και στη συνέχεια στο London School of Economics. Μετά τις σπουδές της, το 1963, εκλέχθηκε διδάσκουσα στο University College London (UCL) όπου και παρέμεινε μέχρι την συνταξιοδότηση της, το 2021, αλλά και στην συνέχεια ως ομότιμη καθηγήτρια....

Yesterday, I dug into the deepest nest of folders on my MacBook Pro to find a paper I wrote on a 512K Mac in 1987, for a magazine that no longer exists and isn’t (AFAICT) digitally archived. The file must have made transitions from “hard floppies” to removable 44Mb drives (remember them?) to hard drive to SSD and then, when that filled up, to my iCloud backup. Today, I read about “digital hoarding“. Count me in! Whatever the psychological causes, it’s hard to imagine negative...

from Gregory A. Daneke  Given the numerous disasters exhibited of late involving Mainstream Economics, various heterodox economists have called for much greater consideration of ecological processes (both natural and social, see Fullbrook & Morgan, 2001).  Such processes, in turn, have become increasingly illuminated through the burgeoning science of complex adaptive systems (e.g., Preiser, et al, 2018). What some of these earnest observers fail to fully appreciate, however, is that...

from Oxfam An age of crisis, causing huge suffering for most of humanity As billionaires, government leaders and corporate executives jet in to meet atop their mountain in Davos, Switzerland, the world faces a dramatic, dangerous and destructive set of simultaneous crises. These are having a terrible impact on the majority of people, something Oxfam sees in its work across the world. In 2022, the World Bank announced that we will fail to meet the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030,...

My thoughts on why the exposure of Adani’s dubious dealings came as no surprise Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll As a young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the pleasure and privilege of having Hyman Minsky as a teacher. He was a great inspiration at the time. He still is. The concepts which it is usual to ignore or deemphasize in interpreting Keynes — the cyclical perspective, the relations between investment and finance, and uncertainty, are the keys to an understanding of the full significance of his contribution … The glib assumption made by Professor Hicks in his...