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from Blair Fix We’re now in a position to look at the changing ideological landscape that is written in the English language. To quantify ideological change, I measure how the frequency of biblical/economics jargon has changed with time in the Google English corpus. Figure 10 shows my results. Here the blue line shows the annual frequency of biblical jargon. The red line shows the annual frequency of economics jargon. Note that the frequency is expressed per thousand words, so you can...

Open thread Jan. 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com

from Lars Syll The mainstream textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way, the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio. In his Macroeconomics — just to...

from Duncan Austin A major first response to our sustainability challenges has been to try and turn profit to more sustainable ends. Alas, even ‘purposeful profit’ seems unable to overcome the deeper momentum of what might be termed ‘externality-denying capitalism’ – ‘externality-denying’ in that billions of daily investment and consumption decisions ignore certain of their social and environmental consequences. As just one example, the World Bank reports that less than 4 percent of...

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...