economics

Created
Mon, 10/07/2023 - 23:14
It is not possible to determine the scientific method that it is appropriate to employ for a given task (in a particular context) without knowing the nature of the task. And to know the nature of any scientific task it is always essential to have an insight into (i.e., to seek to determine) the nature […]
Created
Tue, 04/07/2023 - 23:41
According to Keynes, financial crises are a recurring feature of our economy and are linked to its fundamental financial instability: It is of the nature of organised investment markets, under the influence of purchasers largely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market […]
Created
Thu, 06/07/2023 - 00:18
The recurring pattern in financial crises is more or less the same. For some reason, a shift occurs in the economic cycle (such as war, innovations, new regulations, etc.) that leads to changes in the profit opportunities for banks and companies. Demand and prices rise, pulling more and more parts of the economy into a […]
Created
Tue, 04/07/2023 - 18:33
Having read Syll’s book, one cannot avoid wondering how it is that modern mathematical economics still holds such a dominant position in terms of textbooks and economic practice. This is especially so if you consider two things: First, if one peruses the shelves of economic literature of any major bookstore (in London or even Copenhagen), […]
Created
Mon, 03/07/2023 - 23:43
Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to exercises in hypothetical reasoning – they provide best-case scenarios of what we could infer from specific data. Even more unfortunate, however, is that this exercise is deceptive to the extent it ignores or misrepresents available information, and makes hidden assumptions that are unsupported […]
Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 01:40
Jason Collins discusses a paper by Milkman et al. that presented “a megastudy testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000 experimental participants” … Collins’s discussion seems reasonable to me. In particular, I agree with his big problem about the design of this “mega-study,” which is that there’s all sorts of rigor in the […]