~by Sean Paul Kelley Good heavens, the economic bad news is piling up like a bad car wreck. So, let’s do some serious rubbernecking, folks, because there is a lot of fucked up shit to watch. Just don’t step in it, okay? We begin with widepsread reports of large institutional investors (hedge funds, investment banks, […]
economics
My new book, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? is out and available at/through all fine book stores. And hopefully some disreputable ones too!
Game theory is, like mainstream economics in general, model-oriented. There are many reasons for this – the history of the discipline, ideals borrowed from the natural sciences (especially physics), the search for universality (explaining as much as possible with as little as possible), rigour, precision, and so on. Most mainstream economists and game theorists seek […]
To make a statement about probability in a real world it is necessary to compound the probability derived from the model itself with the probability that the model is itself true. And there is no means of knowing whether the model is true; indeed it is difficult even to attach meaning to the concept ‘the […]
The financial crisis of 2007-2008 took both laypeople and economists by surprise. What went wrong with our macroeconomic models, since they clearly did not foresee the collapse, or even make it conceivable? Many have attempted to answer that question, offering a range of explanations, from the excessive mathematization of economics to irrational and corrupt politicians. […]
What I’d like to capture is the effect of those choices economists make “for convenience,” to be able to reach solutions, to simplify, to ease their work, in short, to make a model tractable. While those assumptions are conventional and meant to be lifted as mathematical, theoretical and empirical skills and technology (hardware and software) […]
När jag växte upp på 1960-talet var bilden av vår dåvarande statsminister — Tage Erlander — bilden av en hygglig och snäll farbror som berättade roliga historier i Hylands hörna. När man läser hans dagböcker från 40- och 50-talen — vilket jag roat mig med på sistone när jag befunnit mig på min skärgårdsö utanför […]
. A government issuing debt in its own currency can always technically meet its obligations — by creating money to pay off that debt. The real constraint on government spending isn’t the debt level, but inflation. Central to the Keynesian-influenced view on debt is the fundamental difference between private and public debt. Conflating the one […]
Balliol Croft, Cambridge27. ii. 06My dear Bowley, I have not been able to lay my hands on any notes as to Mathematico-economics that would be of any use to you: and I have very indistinct memories of what I used to think on the subject. I never read mathematics now: in fact I have forgotten […]
The so-called Nobel Prize in Economics (technically, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). This year’s award went to Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt, and Joel Mokyr for their contributions to what’s broadly called “Schumpeterian growth theory” — work that connects innovation and technological change to economic growth … Aghion and […]