Thirty years ago, yours truly wrote an article on revealed preference theory that was published in History of Political Economy (Vol. 25, 1993). Paul Samuelson wrote me a kind letter informing me that he had been the one to recommend the article for publication. Although he liked much of it, he also published a comment […]
economics
Public debt is normally nothing to fear, especially if it is financed within the country itself (but even foreign loans can be beneficent for the economy if invested in the right way). Some members of society hold bonds and earn interest on them, while others pay taxes that ultimately pay the interest on the debt. […]
När Karl-Gustav Landgren år 1960 lade fram sin avhandling Den ‘nya ekonomien’ i Sverige. J. M. Keynes, E. Wigforss, B. Ohlin och utvecklingen 1927-39 väckte en av hans huvudteser stor uppmärksamhet — och ogillande — från flera håll. Utifrån en ingående genomgång av vad svenska ekonomer och politiker skrev om arbetsmarknads- och konjunkturpolitik under 1920- […]
Inflation peaked back in June 2022, only three months after the Fed started hiking interest rates. At that time, the Fed’s policy rate had risen just 75 basis points, and no one knew how much higher it might go. In fact, we have no evidence that monetary policy had any significant effect on the course taken by prices — […]
The truly important difference between us and our colleagues in the natural sciences lies in the fact that we never arrive at constants such as the speed of light and sound in a given medium, or the specific weights of atoms and molecules. We possess nothing corresponding to the universally valid measures of energy, voltage, […]
The UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 revealed 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 […]
. Public debt is normally nothing to fear, especially if it is financed within the country itself (but even foreign loans can be beneficent for the economy if invested in the right way). Some members of society hold bonds and earn interest on them, while others pay taxes that ultimately pay the interest on the […]
The purported strength of New Classical macroeconomics is that it has firm anchorage in preference-based microeconomics, and especially the decisions taken by inter-temporal utility maximising ‘forward-looking’ individuals. To some of us, however, this has come at too high a price. The almost quasi-religious insistence that macroeconomics has to have microfoundations — without ever presenting any […]
Today’s headline news chronicles our triumphant, record-breaking petroleum exports: 6.4 million barrels a day. The highest weekly figure ever recorded. On the surface, it appears America may just make up in exports what the closure of the Straits of Hormuz prevents. On the surface. The reality of our domestic petroleum situation is more dire. The […]
For more than 20 years, economists were enthralled by so-called “rational expectations” models … That such models prevailed bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science … Good science recognises its limitations, but the prophets of rational expectations have usually shown no such modesty. Joseph Stiglitz The rational expectations hypothesis presupposes — basically for […]