Serious question. In your opinions, dear readers, which is a more accurate measure of an economy: nominal GDP or purchasing power parity? I lean towards PPP myself, as I’ve traveled so much (65 nations and counting) I’ve internalized what the local value of a currency can buy versus what a dollar can by at home. […]
economics
I started my undergraduate studies in economics in the late 1970s after starting out as an Arts student in the early 1970s studying philosophy, politics, history, anthropology and statistics. The Vietnam War movement and other things interrupted my first years of studies and it wasn’t until the Federal government introduced the National Employment and Training…
Each capitalist, Marx noted, has an ambiguous relation to the workers. On the one hand, she wants the workers she employs to have low wages, since that makes for high profits. On the other hand, she wants all other workers to have high wages, since that makes for high demand for her products. Although it is […]
Well, if we are to believe most mainstream economists, models are what make economics a science. Economics is uniquely model-oriented among the social sciences. This stems from its history, its emulation of natural sciences like physics, and its pursuit of universal, rigorous explanations based on minimal principles. Mainstream economists seek to explain social phenomena by […]
The methodological structure of mainstream economics often relies on axioms and theorems that are tautological by design, which severely limits their informational content. A prime example is modern expected utility theory. Its core weakness lies in the minimal constraints placed on individual preferences; this extreme flexibility allows the theory to be reconciled with virtually any […]
The rational expectations hypothesis presupposes — largely for reasons of internal consistency — that agents possess complete knowledge of all relevant probability distributions. When economists attempt to incorporate learning into these models, it is always in a very restricted sense. Nothing genuinely unanticipated ever occurs; instead, learning is reduced to a mechanical process of updating […]
There are several reasons for the insularity of economics, most importantly the different epistemological cultures of the various social science disciplines and the power inequalities between them. First, the theory of action that comes with economists’ analytical style is hardly compatible with the basic premise of much of the human sciences, namely that social processes […]
Fackföreningsekonomen Daniel Lind och ekonomiprofessorn Lars Calmfors har under det senaste året haft en animerad diskussion om forskningen kring ‘monopsoni’ och ‘lägstalöner’ i Ekonomisk Debatt och Affärsvärlden. En central tvistefråga i diskussionen mellan Lind och Calmfors gäller lägstalönerna i Sverige. Lind hävdar att höjda lägstalöner inte med nödvändighet behöver leda till färre jobb. Han menar […]
I often get asked about cryptocurrency. And I immediately become bored. The sort of claims that people have made about this phenomenon, which is historically just another speculative asset, are over-the-top to say the least. There are two realities that seem to be ignored. First, we already have mainstream digital money and have had for…
MMT is fundamentally a reaction to the way money is described in mainstream economic theory, where money is seen as something that people save by depositing it in banks, and which banks in turn can lend out by creating credit. Thus, the money creation by banks presupposes that private individuals save. But that idea is […]