Alex Rosenberg, professor of philosophy at Duke University and a leading figure in economic methodology, offers a thought-provoking critique of Paul Krugman’s economic philosophy in an article published in 3:AM Magazine. Rosenberg writes: Krugman writes: “So how do you do useful economics? In general, what we really do is combine maximization-and-equilibrium as a first cut […]
economics
Socialismens ABC är en fördjupningspodd från Katalys. Den inledande serien fokuserar på Karl Marx’ liv och idéarv. Få tänkare har haft ett så genomgripande inflytande på världen som Karl Marx. Trots att det har gått ett och ett halvt sekel sedan hans död, är hans idéer fortfarande högaktuella. I avsnitt fem av serien diskuteras Marx’ […]
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. To simply assume that economic processes are ergodic and concentrate on ensemble averages — and hence in any relevant sense timeless — is not a sensible way for dealing with the kind of genuine uncertainty that permeates real-world economies. Ergodicity and the crucial distinction between time averages […]
. Hyperinflation — a rapid and uncontrolled surge in prices that destroys the value of money — is often wielded as a warning against excessive government spending or monetary expansion. Cases like Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela loom large in policy discussions. Yet for nations that issue their own sovereign fiat currency, hyperinflation is far […]
Twenty-two years ago, Swedish citizens were asked whether they wanted to join the eurozone. Of the 83% of registered voters who participated in the referendum, nearly 57% voted ‘no.’ The result came as a complete shock to the Swedish establishment. All major political parties and business organisations had backed the euro. Despite the ‘yes’ side […]
To understand real-world ‘non-routine’ decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. When we cannot accept that the observations, […]
The Consumer Price Index is taken as a proxy for how much consumers pay for goods and services. It isn’t, for a wide variety of reasons. Here’s another: This is a component of overall CPI, but what it tracks is actually retained earnings. The justification is that if retained earnings are down, more of […]
Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, […]
Precis som i övriga världen handlar dagens svenska inflation delvis om att en del företag och kapitalägare vill passa på och öka sina vinstmarginaler utan att det i någon egentlig mening föreligger reala kostnadsökningar som ‘berättigar’ detta. Den typen av i ‘smyg’ höjda priser blir allt lättare att genomföra i takt med att inflationsförväntningar stiger. […]
Yesterday we talked about AI: how business has been adopting it wholesale even though so far most of the evidence is that it performs worse than humans on almost all tasks. They do this because bosses don’t want to deal with employees: they want drones that just do what they’re told, and hope that AI […]