I first heard Peter Singer speak at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in the summer of 2009. The subject was the ethics of what we eat, and the tone of the talk was open and generous. Some in the audience were hardcore animal-rights people, as one would expect at a Singer gig. But the philosopher’s message was that ethical eating is, in fact, a pretty complex matter, bearing not only on animal welfare but also on economic justice and the environmental impact of agriculture, and that what counted as ethical behaviour in one sphere was often difficult to reconcile with ethical behaviour in others. His advice was therefore to do what we could, advice I for one resolved to follow before hogging into the free wine and nibbles around the Beaux-Arts-style reflecting pool.
economics
Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption.
Evidently, however, the potential for the strictly natural natural experimental approach, which relies exclusively on natural events as instruments, is constrained by the small number of random events provided by nature and by the fact that most outcomes of interest are the result of many factors associated with preferences, technologies, and markets. And the prospect […]
Att låna till försvaret är enligt finanspolitiska rådet inte att rekommendera. I Finanspolitiska rådets årliga rapport som presenterades häromdagen föreslås istället att de kraftfulla aviserade försvarssatsningarna på uppemot 300 miljarder kronor finansieras via höjda skatter eller omprioriteringar i statsbudgeten. Hade man föreslagit att skattefinansieringen skulle ske genom kraftigt höjd progression i inkomstskatterna, kapitalskatter eller särskilda […]
. While the United States often symbolises extreme wealth concentration, the perception of Sweden as an egalitarian utopia requires re-examination. In recent decades, economic inequality in Sweden has grown at a rate that, in some respects, rivals that of the US. Although Sweden maintains a robust social safety net, the underlying income inequality has surged. […]
När Finanspolitiska rådet med den väne Lars Heikensten i spetsen riktade kritik mot att regeringen inte följt sitt eget ekonomiska regelverk, kunde inte Mikael Damberg hålla sig. Han gick rätt i fällan, bekräftandes bilden att pengarna är slut. Men fakta är att Sverige har en mycket låg statsskuld. Vi har stora investeringsbehov. Och nationen Sverige […]
Perhaps the foremost financial crisis theorist of our time, Hyman Minsky, had as his central idea that crises are endogenous (system-internal) phenomena where stability creates instability and reduces safety margins for financial transactions with excessively high leverage effects. During the upswing phase of financial bubbles, safety margins shrink, and even the smallest setback can lead […]
Neoclassical economics is known for its illicit use of garbled language which hides and convolutes instead of explains … An interesting example is the chapter by Edward Prescott, titled ‘RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory’. Let’s first give the floor to him, mind that ‘leisure’ means ‘measured unemployment’: “What turned out to […]
~by Sean Paul Kelley Couple of random notes this Friday morning, mostly economics related, some silver news and my personal reaction to portions of the discusssion in Ian’s “Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?” post. First, econonomics. It looks more and more like we are heading into a 2008-style credit crisis/crunch. Don’t believe […]