2. Macro Musings 7. Naked Capitalism 20. Lars Pålsson Syll Lars Pålsson Syll’s blog illustrates his critique of the conventional economics paradigm together with other heterodox economic views. Engaged with the issues of economic methodology, monetary theory and the shortcomings of neoclassical economics, Syll seeks to overturn orthodoxy and calls for more profound understanding of […]
economics
Beneath the civic ideal of taxation as a collective, equitable endeavour lies an entrenched hypocrisy: the architecture of modern tax codes serves not the public good but the consolidation of private wealth. The progressivity of income tax is hollowed out at the uppermost tiers, where income is largely derived from capital — taxed at preferential […]
The scientist’s purpose motivates the modeling exercise and guides the construction of the model. Specifically, the scientist constructs a model with an eye toward making available model narratives that enable the modeler to produce an answer to the motivating question in terms of the target. The model acts as a surrogate for the target in […]
There are many kinds of useless economics held in high regard within the mainstream economics establishment today. Few — if any — are less deserving than the macroeconomic theory or method — mostly connected with Nobel laureates Finn Kydland, Robert Lucas, Edward Prescott and Thomas Sargent — called calibration. In physics, it may not strain […]
Guest Post by Nat Wilson Turner Last Fall, I posited that the US and greater West are in the grips of an Interregnum of Unreality that began when Barack Obama successfully papered over the Great Financial Crisis while addressing none of the causes and leaving the very same banksters whose antics caused the crisis in […]
The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris […]
. Important and far-reaching questions indeed. Taxing the rich is not only a question of raising revenue or counteracting potentially increasing inflation. Inequality that undermines democracy is a dangerous thing. Without a conscious effort to counteract the inevitable forces driving our societies towards extreme income and wealth inequality, our societies fracture. It is crucial to […]
Many politicians and economists subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment are doomed to fail, since governments and central banks cannot push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation. Although this may sound convincing, it is totally wrong! One of the main problems […]
They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles […]
. ‘Rigorous’ and ‘precise’ economic models cannot be considered anything else than unsubstantiated conjectures as long as they aren’t supported by evidence from outside the theory or model. To my knowledge, no in any way decisive empirical evidence has been presented. No matter how precise and rigorous the analysis, and no matter how hard one […]