Faced with new social, climatic and geopolitical challenges, Europe has no choice but to reinvent itself if it wants to play a useful role for its citizens and the planet. It is with this in mind that a new organisation created in 2022 met a fortnight ago in Moldova: the European Political Community (EPC). The initiative deserves to be applauded. By bringing together 47 countries, from the United Kingdom to Ukraine and from Norway to Switzerland and Serbia, the EPC is a reminder that the...

Marc Lavoie has written this post on the current inflation debates, which received some attention. We had a conversation (I don't say debate because we mostly agreed, and the video is here, last September). I also recommend Julia Braga and Franklin Serrano's paper on Marc's chapter on inflation, which is relevant for the current debates. The debate rages, within heterodoxy, as if a lot of the ideas are new, but quite frankly they are a recap of discussions of the past, particularly for those...

Are personal consumption expenditures a helpful forecasting (or even nowcasting) metric? An overview  – by New Deal democrat As I’ve noted a number of times recently, in addition to payrolls the other positive datapoint keeping the economy growing is real personal spending. Here is what it looks like in total, plus broken down by goods and services for the past several years: The trend in both, at least since last June, is definitely higher....

from Lars Syll Thirty years ago yours truly wrote an article on revealed preference theory that got published in History of Political Economy (no. 25, 1993). Paul Samuelson wrote a kind letter and informed me that he was the one who had recommended it for publication. But although he liked it a lot, he also wrote a comment — published in the same volume of HOPE — saying: Between 1938 and 1947, and since then as Pålsson Syll points out, I have been scrupulously careful not to claim for...

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One would have to be totally unknowing or have a ignorant disregard for wetlands near streams, rivers, and lakes. Wetlands purify our water by removing sediments and other pollutants including chemicals. Wetlands also filter and process excess nutrients that may runoff from agricultural and development sites. Wetlands hold on to the water long enough to allow the sediments and other pollutants to settle out and the purified water then enters...

Alito pretends physics does not exist. Nearby wetlands do not matter unless they have a surface connection to a stream, river, or lake. The notion a wetland can only be linked to streams or lakes by a continuous surface connection—presumably visible to the justices themselves—is fundamentally at odds with hydrology or the science of water. The movement of water beneath the surface (groundwater) connects water bodies in ways that are just as or more...

‘Covering law’ explanations in economics As a philosopher of science, it is interesting to note that many economists and other social scientists appeal to a requirement that explanations, in order to be considered scientific, must be capable of “reducing an individual case to a general law.” As a fundamental principle, a general law is often invoked in the form of “if A, then B,” and if one can demonstrate in individual cases that if A and B are present,...

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Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...