The Fiscal Policy Experience Since the Great Recession
Why fiscal policy measures after the crisis were too weak.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Measuring the Impact of Immigration on Wages: The Mariel Boatlift Controversy
125,000 mainly low-skill Cuban immigrants arrived in Miami in 1980. Economists are still debating whether they lowered local wages.
Read more...Economic Ideas You Should Forget
Economics is a progressive science that is enriched by the ‘creative destruction’ of ideas.
Read more...The New New Deal
The myth of the virtues of markets is past its sell-by date. Time for a new guiding principle, and the New Deal may be the place to start.
Read more...Healthcare Inefficiency: “Low-Quality Drugs Diffuse More Quickly in the US”
Another way in which the US health care system is exceptional: minimally effective drugs find a market faster here than abroad.
Read more...Hayek and Neoclassicals Meet Information Theory and Fail
Why the left doesn’t need to engage Hayek, Friedman, and neoclassical economics but should instead argue from information theory.
Read more...How Financialization and the “New Economy” Hurt Science and Engineering Grads
How the “new economy” devalued science and engineering degrees.
Read more...Immiseration Revisited: The Four Phases of Working Time
Immiseration theory, or why employers aren’t nicer to workers even though they become less productive the longer their workday.
Read more...Compassionate Capitalism in the Middle Ages: Profit and Philanthropy in Medieval Cambridge
More evidence that “capitalism” comes in more and less predatory forms.
Read more...Understanding Household Financial Distress: The Role of Noncognitive Abilities
A critical thinking exercise on a study that claims that psychological traits are linked to financial distress.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Review of Steve Keen’s “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?”
Steve Keen’s book is a compact, layperson friendly evisceration of mainstream economics and efforts to defend banks at the expense of citizens.
Read more...Taxes, and the Parable of “Turning Litter Into Money”
I take my business cards out here, and these are twenty dollars a piece, if anybody wants to buy any. No? Any takers?
Read more...The Operation and Demise of the Bretton Woods System: 1958 to 1971
Even though the Bretton Woods system was short lived, legacies like the dollar standard remain and are likely to be with us for some time.
Read more...Against False Arrogance of Economic Knowledge
The shortcomings of economic reasoning are well known, yet mainstream practitioners embrace and defend them.
Read more...The Failure of Austerity in the Great Recession
More evidence that austerity is a bad idea.
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