economics

Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 19:11
[Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of.  John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in […]
Created
Tue, 27/06/2023 - 01:29
After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate […]
Created
Thu, 22/06/2023 - 18:03
My early academic work was on the Phillips curve and the precision in estimating the concept of a natural rate of unemployment, or the rate of unemployment where inflation stabilises at some level. This rate is now commonly referred to as the Non-Accelerating-Rate-of-Unemployment (NAIRU) and my contribution was one of the first studies to show…
Created
Wed, 21/06/2023 - 21:02
Göran Perssons ord från mitten av 1990-talet ekar fortfarande genom svensk politik. Varje politiskt förslag som kan höja statsskulden bemöts av varningar om hur Sverige på den tiden stod på ruinens brant. Perssons resa till New York, där han enligt egen utsago tvingades gå med mössan i hand till Wall Streets lånehajar och utlova nedskärningar, […]
Created
Wed, 21/06/2023 - 23:31
There is a trade-off in economics (and elsewhere) between rigor and relevance: the more we achieve deductive certainty in our arguments, the less likely it is that we will achieve socially and politically relevant conclusions. This trade-off, as we shall see, is not logically inevitable but, nevertheless, it is rarely avoided in economic theorizing. Sraffian […]
Created
Wed, 21/06/2023 - 16:45
Black Friday 1929 market fundamentalist wet dreams of eternal growth took a serious hit. The stock market bubble exploded and crashed. Today​ we have a stock market situation starting to more and more remind us of that in 1929. Those of us who know Keynes-Fisher-Kindleberger-Minsky-Shiller and have not completely forgotten all about economic​ history are […]