Den värld vi lever i är i grunden osäker och kvantifierbara sannolikheter är undantaget snarare än regeln. Om ”Gud inte spelar tärning” som Einstein hävdade, skulle jag tillägga ”inte heller människor.” Världen som vi känner den kan endast i begränsad omfattning förstås utifrån antaganden om säker och fullkomlig kunskap. Dess inneboende och nästan obegränsade komplexitet […]
economics
Unlike anthropologists … economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a practice which frees us from limiting ourselves to societies which can be physically visited as sparing us the discomforts of long stays among savages. This method of society-invention is the source of the utopian character of economics; and of the mix of distrust […]
The euro has taken away the possibility for national governments to manage their economies in a meaningful way — and the people have had to pay the true costs of its concomitant misguided austerity policies. The unfolding of the repeated economic crises in Euroland during the last decade has shown beyond any doubt that the […]
The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has — or should — the teaching of economics be modified … The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for […]
A talk to the Economic Society of Australia: Monsters in the Machine, Technology, Growth & Human Flourishing An Author Talk with Goldfields Libraries An appearance on the Breaking the Spell podcast
11) To criticise/oppose the current mathematical modelling emphasis is to adopt an antiscience stance. It is not. Mathematics is not essential (or inessential) to science; science involves using tools that are appropriate to the given task. A science of economics is perfectly feasible, and the current emphasis on mathematical modelling in economics serves, given the […]
I veckans avsnitt av Starta Pressarna intervjuas Clara E. Mattei — författare till boken Kapitalets ordning: Hur ekonomer skapade åtstramningsdoktrinen och banade väg för fascismen (Verbal förlag, 2023) — och diskuteras hennes tes om att den ekonomiska åtstramningspolitiken historiskt växt fram som ett sätt att hålla tillbaka arbetarklassen. Som alltid på den här podden — […]
The basic problems mostly originate at the level of methodology, and in particular with the current emphasis on methods of mathematical modelling. The latter emphasis is an error given the lack of match of the methods in question to the conditions in which they are applied. So long as the critical focus remains only, or […]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867) Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (1911) Nikolai Kondratiev, The Major Economic Cycles (1925) Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1930) John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (1936) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Paul […]