15th of May 2025 As John Lanchester recently remarked (LRB 27 April 2025) ‘However little money there is for anything else, there’s always enough money for a war’. The failures of neoliberal economics threaten all kinds of political backlashes, some of which have already been seen in the nationalist turn of international relations. ‘Military Keynesianism’ … Continue reading Military Keynesianism?
economics
Thomas Piketty has finally discovered — mirabile dictu — something called ‘unequal exchange’. Impressive, indeed … But perhaps he should take a look at this 50-year-old book by Arghiri Emmanuel: Or why not have a look at this 25-year-old book by Alf Hornborg:
Let me state my two main conclusions. First, starting from sharply different views, there has been substantial convergence, both in terms of methodology and in terms of architecture. Second, this convergence has been mostly in the right direction, allowing future research to build on the existing conceptual structure. Put strongly, macroeconomics may have a claim […]
What economics does is to convert open systems into closed systems by excluding ‘moves’ which would render the system unstable. Dictators ‘freeze the frame’ by order: economists do it by ‘modelling.’ They model the world as a giant computer network in which every possible move has been programmed, and anything outside the frame excluded by […]
Behavioral models often take as a starting point a standard economic model and reinterpret the model as a description how the person thinks and feels. Next, an (often compelling) case is made that many of the assumptions are unrealistic because humans cannot perform the difficult mental tasks embodied in the formalism. The mistake or bias […]
. As Cartwright convincingly argues, although economics produces knowledge, it is only partial — knowledge that is useful in specific contexts but not universally generalizable. Mainstream economics certainly aspires to be an exact science, but if it is to be considered as such, it only applies to the ‘small worlds’ that economists know how to […]
One line of thought that can be found in Mill is that good methodology consists in investigating significant forces in isolation from all interfering factors. When we have a good understanding of the behavior of all the main forces we can try to see how to put them all together. Thus we need only assume, […]
Despite its pretensions the mainstream failed to predict, has failed to adequately explain, and continues to fail to appropriately diagnose solutions for the major economic crises of the 21st century: from the Dot-Com collapse of 20012, to the financial crisis of 2008-10 and most recently Covid19 and its aftermath. Syll demonstrates that very little if […]
When we provide such a critique, we often hear another mantra to which many economists subscribe: ‘It takes a model to beat a model.’ On the contrary, we believe that it takes facts and observations to beat a model … If a model fails to answer the problem to which it is addressed, it should […]