Paul Krugman, commenting on a Wall Street Journal article that invoked, then tried to dismiss, concerns about resource scarcity, defended Malthus: Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era. Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th […]
Read more...Ann Pettifor argues in The Guardian’s Comment is Free discusses some misperceptions about our current economic crisis and argues that the wrong lessons are being drawn from 1929. She writes from a UK vantage but much of the discussion is relevant to the US: In debates about the financial crisis – on the left and […]
Read more...One of the hobbyhorses of the rational-choice economics types is that voting is irrational. The odds of your vote making a difference are ludicrously small, so why bother? Readers may recall that the New York Times picked up on the argument by Lloyd Cohen of George Mason Univerisity that, contrary to widely held views, buying […]
Read more...On the one hand, I should be flattered that Brad DeLong took the time and trouble to take two posts (here and here) to respond to my comments on an earlier post of his, in which I objected to his and Summers’ notion of having the government fund either directly or indirectly, the purchase of […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik provides us the introduction to a new paper (co-authored with Arvind Subramanian), “Why Did Financial Globalization Disappoint?” which argus that financial liberalization. meaning making their economies more open to international capital flows, has not been a boon for developing economies. It has not produced not better growth and has increased volatility (think of […]
Read more...Two readers wrote to me concerning phenomena we’ve mentioned upon occasion in the expanding credit crunch, and it seemed a good opportunity to discuss them longer form. There are two separate, but related threads: we are now seeing a lot of “every man for himself” behavior (liquidity hoarding is one of many examples) that seem […]
Read more...For Project Syndicate, Brad DeLong writes that the Friedman era may be over and gives some initial thought to what a new system (he doesn’t attach a name to it) might look like (hat tip Mark Thoma). I’m always amazed by the deference with which American economists, even those of a liberal persuasion, treat Friedman’s […]
Read more...Ben Stein gives us another installment of his usual sloppy thinking. In his latest offering, “Exxon Mobil Needs a Hug,” he declares: After all, Big Oil is big us. And we need us. Since I don’t consider myself Big Oil, and I imagine most readers would object to being considered to be Big Oil, all […]
Read more...Quite often, policy debates get mired in superficial, outdated, manipulated, or simply incomplete understandings of the facts. Getting relevant data is vital to coming up with intelligent approaches. Unfortunately, Paul Krugman, who has tried getting to the bottom of whether trade has increased income inequality in the US, concludes that we don’t have the right […]
Read more...Last week, we featured a post by Thomas Palley, “Breaking the Neoclassical Mold in Economics,” which provoked quite a lively discussion as to what mainstream economics was and wasn’t, and the uses and limitations of neoclassical economics. Thus, I thought readers might find further grist for thought in this post from Robert Vinneau, who takes […]
Read more...Dear reader, even if your taste runs to the practical rather than the theoretical, I strongly suggest you read this post from Thomas Palley. Like it or not, most news reporting and just about all policy discussions in the finance/economics realm are filtered through a particular frame of reference, namely, neoclassical economics. Palley points out […]
Read more...A very good Project Syndicate article by Thomas Palley highlights the way a shift in US policy priorities circa the early 1980s has lead to a lasting change in the foundation of economic growth in the US. Prior to that, the emphasis was on increasing incomes of workers and being wary of trade deficits. As […]
Read more...Once in a while, separate thinkers reach strikingly similar conclusion. It gets even more interesting when their observations come to light in a compressed timeframe. Yesterday, Willem Buiter pointed out a major difference in perspective between US and foreign economists. Americans are wedded to the idea of doing whatever it takes to forestall a recession, […]
Read more...Willem Buiter continues his quixotic campaign to extirpate lousy economic logic in the US. In a colorfully written post, he ridicules the refusal of any US economist (as far as he can tell) to consider that an American recession is necessary. He points to the obvious fact (commented on repeatedly in this blog) that the […]
Read more...This article from Project Syndicate (hat tip Mark Thoma) is a report from Davos by Nobel Prize winner Joesph Stiglitz on the considerable skepticism abroad toward US financial and business practice, particularly our faith in deregulation. It is a telling indicator of how rapidly the world is changing, yet many in the US are still […]
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