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Created
Tue, 18/02/2020 - 06:21
Permalink to this post I’ve been very lucky over the years to work closely with some extraordinary people on various research and other public-interest-minded projects through BKC. The title has been variously “research assistant,” “associate,” or “coordinator,” with lots of thinking through and writing about pressing issues with a sharp eye and a nuanced pen, […]
Created
Mon, 17/10/2022 - 04:48
Permalink to this post. That was the question of a Stanford/UCLA symposium held in October, 2022. We were asked to write five-page papers to answer the question. Here is the collection. My answer is below:   “Should Donald Trump be returned to social media?” No, he should not. To be sure, it’s bizarre that the President […]
Created
Wed, 10/08/2022 - 23:59

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog debunking economists’ claims about productivity. Usually, I come at the problem from a fairly technical angle, meaning I break down the contradictions involved in economists’ methods. Today, I want to try a more philosophical approach. I’m going to talk about dualism — the idea that something […]

The post Dualism in Science, Theology, and Economics appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.

Created
Mon, 13/04/2020 - 22:30
The last ten years have brought Knut Wicksell, a Swedish economist born in the 19th century, closer to the spotlight. His “Interest and Prices” (1898) should be understood as the birth of a new idea of how to explain monetary systems. (I have written about this elsewhere.) While some still pretend that Wicksell was a […]
Created
Tue, 05/05/2020 - 19:58
Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat in seinem Urteil von heute mehreren Verfassungsbeschwerden gegen das Staatsanleihenkaufprogramm (Public Sector Purchase Programme – PSPP) stattgegeben.Die Beschlüsse der EZB zum Staatsanleihenkaufprogramm kompetenzwidrig seien kompetenzwidrig, da die Verhältnismäßigkeit nicht geprüft worden sei: Ein Programm zum Ankauf von Staatsanleihen wie das PSPP, das erhebliche wirtschaftspolitische Auswirkungen hat, setzt insbesondere voraus, dass das währungspolitische Ziel und […]
Created
Tue, 05/05/2020 - 22:20
In today’s ruling, the Federal Constitutional Court upheld several constitutional complaints against the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP), stating that the ECB’s decisions on the Public Sector Purchase Programme were incompetent, as the proportionality had not been assessed: A public sector purchase programme such as the PSPP, which has significant economic policy implications, requires in […]
Created
Mon, 11/05/2020 - 21:59
Relatively unobserved by the media and experts, the establishment of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) by the ECB has temporarily severely limited the power of the financial markets over national governments in the euro area. The challenge now is to make this permanent. The ECB’s PEPP is a programme for the purchase of public […]
Created
Thu, 18/06/2020 - 02:37
Originally published June 9th, 2020 in German here, translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) This background article explains where the money for governments in the current crisis comes from and why, contrary to general expectations, the EU will probably not play a major role in this crisis. The Western states decided relatively late to largely shut […]