Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common […]
economics
I was asked during an interview the other day from Paris whether I was a Post Keynesian. I replied not at all and explained that I have never felt that my ideas fit into that category although in a facile sense we are all post keynesian in a temporal sense. Most progressive economists would answer…
Franco Modigliani famously quipped that he did not think that unemployment during the Great Depression should be described, in an economic model, as a “sudden bout of contagious laziness”. Quite. For the past thirty years we have been debating whether to use classical real business cycle models (RBC), or their close cousins, modern New Keynesian […]
The power structures within the profession reinforce the mainstream in different ways, including through the tyranny of so-called top journals and academic and professional employment. Such pressures and incentives divert many of the brightest minds from a genuine study of the economy (to try to understand its workings and the implications for people) to what can […]
Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference […]
. Ett av de grundläggande feltänken i dagens diskussion om statsskuld och budgetunderskott är att man inte skiljer på skuld och skuld. Även om det på makroplanet av nödvändighet är så att skulder och tillgångar balanserar varandra, så är det inte oväsentligt vem som har tillgångarna och vem som har skulderna. Länge har man varit motvillig att öka de […]
Teaching economics students the fundamentals of the utility theory used in mainstream economics is a bit of a challenge. But I guess we all expect the professors to know what they are teaching … At a meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA), 200 of the professional economists present were asked to answer the following […]
To yours truly, the real value of Appelbaum’s meticulously researched history of how economists have come to increasingly influence public policies in modern societies, is that it shows how fundamentally ideological economics is. Of course, you never hear anyone at our seminars telling the lecturer that the assumptions on which his models are built are […]
One of the most important tasks of social sciences is to explain the events, processes, and structures that take place and act in society. Explanations are important within science since the choice between different theories hinges in large part on their explanatory powers. The most reasonable explanation for one theory’s having greater explanatory power than […]
I have been travelling for most of today so I have to keep this post short. Well shorter than usual. Edward Palmer Thompson – who died at the age of 69 in 1993, was a British writer who wrote the exceptional book – The Making of the English Working Class – which was a very…