Philip Pilkington: Why Thomas Piketty is Wrong About Inflation and Interest Rates
Thomas Piketty’s views on inflation and interest rates are decidedly un-Keynesian and wrong to boot.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Philip Pilkington: Cody Wilson and the Language of Power
How a conversation with a crypto anarchist put the BBC on tilt and unwittingly provided a lesson in how power issues are kept out of polite conversation.
Read more...Richard Alford: Not Only Are Economists in Policy Roles Bad at Forecasting, They Also Do a Poor Job of Allowing for Error
Understanding the odds and possible impact of forecasting error should be a important element of policy design. But it isn’t!
Read more...The Economics of Apologies
Apologies really do matter, but they can’t be offered on the cheap.
Read more...Piketty’s Wealth Tax is Real, and It Works
Most economists deride Thomas Piketty’s recommendation of a wealth tax as the remedy to inequality. It might help if they did some empirical research.
Read more...Why QE May Have Done Net Damage
Quantitative easing has been a controversial policy even among the financiers who benefitted from it.
Read more...Is the Strong Dollar the Real Cause of the Collapse of US Manufacturing and Secular Stagnation?
Yves here. I managed to miss this VoxEU post from last month, and it is still timely. It argues that economists have generally been using the wrong measure of relative dollar strength to assess how the level of the currency played into the loss of manufacturing jobs and insufficient internal demand, now better known as “secular stagnation”.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Stockholm Syndrome in the Baltics – Latvia’s Neoliberal War against Labor and Industry
How Latvia, a test case for neoliberal colonialism, has proven to be a test case of how finance-serving policies crush labor and enterprise.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Economics
Varoufakis spoke with Senior Editor Peter Suderman about what he learned as a video game economist, the failings of his chosen academic profession, and how computer games and virtual online worlds might be the future of macroeconomics.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Why Economists Fail to Make ‘Rational’ Judgments and Why You Should Too
Economists flunk one of their own tests, and that says a lot about what “economics” really is about.
Read more...The Myth of the Great Moderation
This is a terrific short video on why the Great Moderation and the underlying restructuring of the economy during that period, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Read more...How Milton Friedman Fomented the Barmy “Corporations Exist to Maximize Shareholder Value” Myth
One of my pet peeves is the degree to which the notion that corporations exist only to serve the interests of shareholders is accepted as dogma and recited uncritically by the business press
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Slide into Deflation, and What to do About It
By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his website. From an interview for Jornal de Negócios by Jorge N. Rodrigues Europe is in the clasp of the deflationary forces that resulted directly from its inane handling of the Eurozone crisis. In this interview, I discuss deflation and […]
Read more...An International Student Call For Pluralism In Economics
A large group of associations of economics students calls for fundamental reform in how economics is taught. And they are already starting to push the envelope on their own.
Read more...Bill Black: Since When Does Refusing to Put Fraudulent Banks into Receivership Help the Economy?
Conservative economists love “creative destruction.” They can’t wait to “get their Schumpeter on” when a business fails and thousands of workers lose their jobs.
There is no more “creative destruction” conceivable than when we put a bank that has become a fraudulent enterprise into receivership, remove the controlling officers leading the fraud, and sell the bank through an FDIC-assisted acquisition
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