Regular readers will know that I have spent quite a lot of time reading the literature in social psychology trying to understand how groups of scholars become crippled with the patterned behaviour that Irving Janis identified as Groupthink in his ground breaking study published in 1972. I feel that my own profession is dominated by…
economics
Paul Krugman has repeatedly over the years argued that we should continue to use mainstream economics hobby horses like IS-LM and AS-AD models. Here’s one example: So why do AS-AD? … We do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we […]
Stephanie Kelton har blivit en fixstjärna för vänstern och kritiker till gängse nationalekonomisk teori. I helgen besökte hon Stockholm. Hon är kritisk till hur inflationen bekämpas: ”Räntehöjningar är ett väldigt trubbigt verktyg” … Kelton besöker Stockholm mitt under en internationell inflationskris. Första frågan till henne under intervjun ett par timmar före hennes medverkan på konferensen blir […]
We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I […]
Economic theory, like anthropology, ‘works’ by studying societies which are in some relevant sense simpler or more primitive than our own, in the hope either that relations that are important but hidden in our society will be laid bare in simpler ones, or that concrete evidence can be discovered for possibilities which are open to […]
För att få svar på det kan du ju testa ekonomiquizet i dagens Sydsvenskan!
Milton Friedman – one of the scholastic protagonists and machinists of Neoliberalism – wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom, tutoring his disciples: “There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces […]
MMT is, first and foremost, a balance sheet approach to macroeconomics. At its very core lie reserve accounting, then deposit accounting, and then sectoral balances accounting. There is very little behaviour in any of this. Equilibrium rules as all balances balance – in both flows and stocks – and there are no assumptions apart from […]
The axioms now in use have been derived from a meagre and narrow experience and from a few particulars of most common occurrence… Nor should it count for much that … he often cites experiments. For he had come to his decision beforehand, without taking proper account of experience in setting up his decisions and […]
. So when ‘modern’ mainstream economists use their models — standardly assuming rational expectations, Walrasian market clearing, unique equilibria, time invariance, linear separability and homogeneity of both inputs/outputs and technology, infinitely lived intertemporally optimizing representative agents with homothetic and identical preferences, etc. — and standardly ignoring complexity, diversity, uncertainty, coordination problems, non-market clearing prices, real […]