Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Tags: open thread

Until now, I’ve always thought about mental health as the absence of mental illness, much as I have typically thought about the absence of physical illness. In both cases, health is the default state or unmarked category. But as I have gone through the Covid pandemic, and become more pessimistic about the state of the world, I have reached the view that a better analogy is with physical fitness. That is, something that requires sustained effort to achieve and maintain, and is rarely...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream economics — really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science. My own take on the issue is that economics — and especially mainstream economics — has lost immensely in terms of status and prestige...

“As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only indirectly inspired from ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an...

(Part of) the Dutch pension system will, if everything goes according to plan, soon be replaced with a new neoliberal system based upon, among other things, measured neoclassical ‘risk aversion’. However – economists are not yet able to measure this – which will lead to big problems. let me explain. The present system consists of: a social democratic element (the ‘first pillar’), a kind of not means tested basic income for everybody...

European Union Inflation Rate

Flattening with the fiscal contraction, but no recession yet: Thank goodness for the rate hikes and their support of personal income ;)

from Lars Syll Ironically, the need for a theory of causation began to surface at the same time that statistics came into being … This was a critical moment in the history of science. The opportunity to equip causal questions with a language of their own came very close to being realized but was squandered. In the following years, these questions were declared unscientific and went underground. Despite heroic efforts by the geneticist Sewall Wright (1889-1988), causal vocabulary was...

Weak headline, but so far not looking as bad as most mistakenly expected with Fed rate hikes: Slowing in real terms but growing: Growing fast in nominal terms: This is telling: They’ve generally been falling off for several years, though up a bit for the last three months since the rate hikes: