The parallelism between economic laissez-faire and Darwinianism … is very close indeed. Darwin invoked sexual love, acting through sexual selection, as an adjutant to natural selection by competition, to direct evolution along lines which should be desirable as well as effective, so the individualist invokes the love of money, acting through the pursuit of profit, […]
economics
During my whole career, I have considered myself somewhat of a schizophrenic, which might be a universal characteristic. On the one hand, I was interested in science qua science, and I have tried — successfully I hope — not to let my ideological viewpoints contaminate my scientific work. On the other, I felt deeply concerned […]
Givet de omfattande behoven är det inte underligt att allt fler röster höjs för en mer expansiv finanspolitik. Det tidigare överskottsmålet, vars syfte var att skapa en buffert för kommande ekonomiska kriser, har nyligen slopats vilket frigör 20–25 miljarder kronor. Likaså har en ökad statlig upplåning redan aviserats, till exempel vad gäller kärnkraft och försvar. Risken […]
. As always, Murphy’s video masterfully distils abstract economic concepts into clear, jargon-free explanations, making complex issues accessible to non-experts and relevant to everyday life. In so-called ‘modern’ macroeconomics—whether in the form of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE), the New Synthesis, New Classical, or ‘New Keynesian’ models — economic variables are treated as if they […]
15th of May 2025 As John Lanchester recently remarked (LRB 27 April 2025) ‘However little money there is for anything else, there’s always enough money for a war’. The failures of neoliberal economics threaten all kinds of political backlashes, some of which have already been seen in the nationalist turn of international relations. ‘Military Keynesianism’ … Continue reading Military Keynesianism?
Thomas Piketty has finally discovered — mirabile dictu — something called ‘unequal exchange’. Impressive, indeed … But perhaps he should take a look at this 50-year-old book by Arghiri Emmanuel: Or why not have a look at this 25-year-old book by Alf Hornborg:
Let me state my two main conclusions. First, starting from sharply different views, there has been substantial convergence, both in terms of methodology and in terms of architecture. Second, this convergence has been mostly in the right direction, allowing future research to build on the existing conceptual structure. Put strongly, macroeconomics may have a claim […]
What economics does is to convert open systems into closed systems by excluding ‘moves’ which would render the system unstable. Dictators ‘freeze the frame’ by order: economists do it by ‘modelling.’ They model the world as a giant computer network in which every possible move has been programmed, and anything outside the frame excluded by […]
Behavioral models often take as a starting point a standard economic model and reinterpret the model as a description how the person thinks and feels. Next, an (often compelling) case is made that many of the assumptions are unrealistic because humans cannot perform the difficult mental tasks embodied in the formalism. The mistake or bias […]