One of the issues that emerges when one is studying undergraduate macroeconomics is that there is a curious disregard for the role that income and wealth distribution play in determining the aggregate outcomes, that are at the centre of the study. Most students in my cohort didn’t think about that and the curriculum certainly didn’t…
economics
Today, economics education has all but erased courses on the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This is not just an oversight — it is an intellectual crisis. A discipline that fails to reflect on its own foundations, that neglects to question its methods and assumptions, is a discipline in decline. History and methodology […]
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 […]
No doubt exists that an entirely different subject has taken over control when it comes to education in scientific methodology in almost the entire field, namely statistics … The value of the statistical regulatory system should of course not be questioned, but it should not be forgotten that other forms of reflection are also cultivated […]
Mainstream economics has sadly made economics increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Trying to contribute to making economics a more realist and relevant science, yours truly launched this blog in March 2011. Now, fourteen years later and with millions of page views, yours truly’s blog is ranked on Top 100 Economics Blogs […]
UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 reveals that Sweden — once a global beacon of equality — has now fallen to the far less enviable position of sixth place among the world’s most unequal countries in terms of wealth. How could things have gone so wrong for a country that, not so long ago, was seen […]
The great difficulty in the social sciences (if we may presume to call them so) of applying scientific method, is that we have not yet established an agreed standard for the disproof of an hypothesis. Without the possibility of controlled experiment, we have to rely on interpretation of evidence, and interpretation involves judgement; we can […]
So, Trump has decided to raise tariffs on India to 50% (who knows if he actually will), over their imports of Russian oil. Meanwhile: Senators Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal are the lead sponsors of a bipartisan bill which would impose primary and secondary sanctions against Russia and entities […]
Few thinkers have had as profound an impact on the world as Karl Marx. Despite the century and a half since his death, his ideas remain highly relevant. A topic that often surfaces when discussing Marx’s seminal economic work — Capital — is the so-called ‘transformation problem.’ An online debate has recently emerged regarding how […]
An economic theory that does not go beyond proving theorems and conditional ‘if-then’ statements — and does not make assertions and put forward hypotheses about real-world individuals and institutions — is of little consequence for anyone wanting to use theories to better understand, explain or predict real-world phenomena. Building theories and models on patently ridiculous […]