A philosopher’s look at science You will already be familiar with the fact that broad swathes of social science research are given over to establishing, analysing, generalising, theorising about and using statistical associations that are manipulated with the assumptions of probability theory. This makes sense if probabilities can be attached to broad swathes of the phenomena that social science is meant to deal with. But can they? Here we face the same...

2023 was the year of the do-nothing House Republicans. What will happen in 2024?

Asymptosis » Economic Origin Stories and the State of the World, Steve Roth. Origin stories and creation myths pack a pretty hefty weight of import in human understandings of the world. Examples are too numerous to mention. What I’ve noticed in the field of economics is such origin stories are often taken (mistakenly) to fully explain the current state of affairs. I’m going to discuss two examples here. 1. Why Money Has Value. The “double...

Students Hijack University to Bring Famous Author

from Andri Stahel and RWER issue 106 Imagine some interstellar anthropologists trying to understand our tribe, the earthlings. On the one hand, they would see a part of the tribe devoted to understanding the functioning of all our Earth systems. Called ‘scientists’, these tribe members command great respect and funds. This function was once held by the shamans and sorcerers who claimed to speak to the spirits who inhabited it; then, it was taken by the priests and theologians...

We have been needing more people, people of some importance, to say something about the economy besides how bad it is. Mind you, no matter how good the recovery is; the negatives will still flow from the other side of the room. If you have been reading New Deal democrat’s commentary at Angry Bear each day, you already have a pretty good idea of where we will land. NDd: “Real retails sales stopped deteriorating YoY last spring, and have been more...

In my latest Guardian piece, I argue that, unless we pay attention to the purchasing power of wages, talk about the “cost of living” is like the sound of one hand clapping The policy debate about the cost of living is among the most confused and confusing in recent memory. All sorts of measures to reduce the cost of living are proposed, then criticised as being potentially inflationary. The argument implies, absurdly, that reducing the cost of living will increase the cost of...

Σταύρος Μαυρουδέας καθηγητής Πολιτικής Οικονομίας στο τμήμα Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής του Πάντειου Πανεπιστημίου Το ψευδεπώνυμο και βιαστικά προωθούμενο νομοσχέδιο για το «Ελεύθερο Πανεπιστήμιο» στοχεύει στην δραστική μετατροπή του πανεπιστημίου σε πεδίο επιχειρηματικής δραστηριότητας. Η δημιουργία του Επιχειρηματικού Πανεπιστημίου είναι στόχος του συστήματος που εδώ και αρκετά χρόνια προωθείται από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση και υπηρετείται από όλες τις ελληνικές κυβερνήσεις. Ισχυρά...

Regularly getting out of your comfort zone is something every investor should do.

Sales lead employment: real aggregate payrolls update  – by New Deal democrat The drought in new data ends tomorrow with consumer inflation. In preparation, let’s take a look at real aggregate payrolls. These increased 0.2% in December, one of the lower readings in the past 2 years: On a YoY basis, aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls increased 5.8%, compared with consumer inflation in November, which increased 3.1%: Recall that...