In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial […]
economics
En gång i tiden var ledstjärnan för den ekonomiska politiken att mildra konjunktur-svängningarna och kapa de djupa dalarna och höga topparna. Nu vill Riksbanken skapa en ekonomisk nedgång för att få ner inflationen samtidigt som finanspolitiken passivt ser på. Penningpolitiken ser ut att kunna sänka den svenska ekonomin. Riksbanken balanserar kort sagt på en knivsegg. […]
Krugman complains that Lerner was too “cavalier” in his discussion of monetary policy since he called for the interest rate to be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment” without saying exactly what that rate should be. It’s an odd critique, since Krugman himself subscribes to the idea that monetary […]
I have argued that there are four major problems in the way of using the counterfactual account for causal inference. Of the four, I argued that the fourth — the problem of indeterminacy — is likely to be the most damaging: To the extent that some of the causal principles that connect counterfactual antecedent and […]
In the 1930s, Lionel Robbins laid down the basic commandments of the discipline when he said that the premises on which economics was founded followed from ‘deduction from simple assumptions reflecting very elementary facts of general experience’, and as such were ‘as universal as the laws of mathematics or mechanics, and as little capable of […]
. Absolutely lovely! Comedian and television host Jon Stewart turns out to know much more about real-world economics than mainstream Harvard economist Larry Summers. Don’t know why, but watching this interview/debate makes yours truly come to think about a famous H. C. Andersen tale …
In The World in the Model, Mary Morgan characterizes the modelling tradition of economics as one concerned with “thin men acting in small worlds” and writes: Strangely perhaps, the most obvious element in the inference gap for models … lies in the validity of any inference between two such different media – forward from the […]
The theory is a vending machine: you feed it input in certain prescribed forms for the desired output; it gurgitates for a while; then it drops out the sought-for representation, plonk, on the tray, fully formed, as Athena from the brain of Zeus. This image of the relation of theory to the models we use […]
‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical Counter Revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization, and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness […]