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Because of the seriousness of the world situation, I have decided to get back in the business of doing interviews (which I do not enjoy doing). Here is a link to my interview (13/12/2022) on RT CrossTalk discussing “New Globalization?” In that connection, here is a link to a paper (written in 2018) titled “The […]

from Lars Syll Many American undergraduates in Economics interested in doing a Ph.D. are surprised to learn that the first year of an Econ Ph.D. feels much more like entering a Ph.D. in solving mathematical models by hand than it does with learning economics. Typically, there is very little reading or writing involved, but loads and loads of fast algebra is required. Why is it like this? … One reason to use math is that it is easy to use math to trick people. Often, if you make your...

from Peter Radford Let the dust settle. Absorb the information embedded in the results. Take a deep breath and avoid partisan primping. First: this election was insanely expensive.  Candidates seeking election to Federal office spent an estimated $8.9 billion.  Their state level counterparts spent a further $7.8 billion.   Second:  all that expenditure had little effect.  Sure, the House changed hands, but by the slimmest of margins, and for all the...

That’s the headline for my latest piece in Inside Story, a review of Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia and Sebastian Edwards The Chile Project . Some extracts The Chile Project, of which Edwards was a generally sympathetic observer, ranks with Thatcher’s Britain as the paradigmatic case of what I’ve called “hard neoliberalism,” which combines authoritarianism and radical free-market policies …Outside the United States, soft neoliberalism was often described as the Third Way....

Summary: to understand inflation we should not use the neoclassical ‘one good, one worker, one sector, one piece of physical capital’ or Y = f(K,L) concept of production. We should use a concept looking at nominal production (Y(n)) with multiple interrelated sectors (‘S’), multiple products and capital conceptualized not as a physical entity but as ownership rights of land (including natural resources), depreciable capital and ‘non produced’ capital like patents and marketing rights:...

from Lars Syll Both approaches to DSGE macroeconometrics (VAR and Bayesian) have evident vulnerabilities, which substantially derive from how parameters are handled in the technique. In brief, parameters from formally elegant models are calibrated in order to obtain simulated values that reproduce some stylized fact and/or some empirical data distribution, thus relating the underlying theoretical model and the observational data. But there are at least three main respects in which...

from Imad Moosa   The spread of the virus has been aided by the neoliberal drive to privatise everything under the sun, including healthcare. Forty years of the privatisation of public health institutions (allegedly in the name of efficiency and for the benefit of consumers) has resulted in a disastrous situation as private healthcare providers have no commercial interest in preparing for or preventing emergencies. The spread has been aided by the lack of staff and material...

Supermarket executives were up on Parliament Hill this week, appearing before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food’s inquiry into food inflation grocery chain profits. They repeated the now-familiar argument that supermarkets have not caused food inflation, they have merely passed along higher input costs to their customers; their profit margins have been stable, it is claimed. Don’t believe them. Here are a few data points on the argument that the chains haven’t...

The Washington Post has a long piece about a Virginia family whose current (substantial but not huge) wealth derives from their slaveholding forebears and who may now be greatly enriched by the discovery of uranium under their land. There’s an interesting discussion of the arguments for and against reparations Buried in the middle of the article is something much more interesting, to me at any rate. One member of the family, Edward Coles, opposed slavery. He hid his views until he...