I see conditions ahead that will determine how the economy will be.
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AJR, Nobel, and prompt engineering
from Peter Radford Well done AJR. A prize deserved. And remarkably little grumbling. What’s wrong with that? In other news, my wife is deep into creating an artificial intelligence application. One of the great challenges of getting AI to be useful is something called ‘prompt engineering’. What have these two snippets of news have in common? The great thing about our better economists — the triumvirate we know affectionately as AJR being an example — is that they all seem to...
Read More »Roger Garrison On The Inadequacy Of Hayekian Triangles
Hayek introduced his triangles in his lectures for his book Prices and Production. The first edition was in 1931 and the second in 1935. He attempted a more general treatment of capital theory in his 1941 book, The Pure Theory of Capital. I want to claim that Hayek knew that he could not draw his triangles under these more general assumptions. And that he knew that capital theory needed more development than he was able to give. Jack Birner knows this, although I do not know a reference...
Read More »MMT explained
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Read More »What to make of the Labour government’s first budget?
Podcasts What to make of the Labour government’s first budget? Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined by James Meadway and Hannah Peaker By Ayeisha Thomas-Smith 01 November 2024 The Autumn Budget was the most significant since George Osborne implemented...
Read More »Statens finanser funkar inte som du tror
Statens finanser funkar inte som du tror Sex av åtta riksdagspartier har nyss ställt sig bakom ett nytt stramt finanspolitiskt ramverk. Osagt i diskussionerna kring ramverket är en bakomliggande föreställning att staten fungerar som ett hushåll eller ett företag: Att det är osunt och riskabelt för staten att ”leva över sina tillgångar” och att dra på sig stora skulder. Att ”den som är satt i skuld är inte fri”. Metaforerna och liknelserna är lika talrika...
Read More »Do you know what net government transfers are?
If so, do you know what to do with this information?
Read More »Central bank independence — a convenient illusion
from Lars Syll Today’s model of delegation has much to recommend it. But it should not be cloaked in euphemism. It is an abrogation of democratic sovereignty for pragmatic reasons, conditioned on the one hand by deeply entrenched and unflattering assumptions about electoral politics and, on the other, on an unquestioning acceptance of the private organization of credit markets and their lack of confidence in democratic control of economic policy. This may be an abrogation that we are...
Read More »What statistics teachers get wrong!
What statistics teachers get wrong! .[embedded content] This insightful video confirms what I always like to emphasize to my doctoral students: Statistics is no substitute for thinking. A non-trivial part of teaching statistics is made up of learning students to perform significance testing. A problem I have noticed repeatedly over the years, however, is that no matter how careful you try to be in explicating what the probabilities generated by these...
Read More »Causes of the Ukraine War & the case for Georgian non-alignment — An interview I gave in Tbilisi, Georgia
Watch the interview here
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