Piketty’s Wealth Tax Won’t Hurt Investment
Transfers don’t matter for investment, and most savings are transfers. Thus Piketty’s wealth tax won’t hurt investment.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
MMT on a Postcard
My reasons for taking MMT seriously are simple and pragmatic: I want people like me (working people) to have nice things — concrete material benefits. Lots of them. And I believe MMT — unlike other schools of thought, but especially neo-liberalism — can deliver on that promise, given the chance. So I took on the project of putting “Why MMT” onto a postcard.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: One Extreme Europe? On the Parliamentary Election Results
Conventional wisdom that extreme parties on the right and left won in the European Parliamentary elections. In fact, only one extreme won.
Read more...Michael Perelman: Vietnam – Invitation to a Morass
How the Vietnam War helped usher in neoliberalism, financialization of the economy, and the use of military spending as stealth stimulus.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Has Thomas Piketty Pulled a Reinhart and Rogoff?
I don’t think that this is a Reinhart and Rogoff moment that discredits the underlying thesis of Piketty’s book. Rather I think that it is just another lesson in data analysis for us all. Lies, lies and damned statistics, as they say
Read more...Financial Times Finds “Many” Errors in Piketty Analysis, Argues They Undermine His Thesis
Chris Giles of the Financial Times has charged Thomas Piketty with making Reinhart and Rogoff-like data and methodological errors in his best-selling book on wealth inequality, Capital in the 21st Century.
Read more...Credence Goods: The Unique Economics of Health Care
Why health care will never work as a market good – there are extreme information asymmetries between the providers and the patients. That means, among other things, we need to recognize the inability of patients to know if they are getting good care or not (beyond a basic level of attentiveness) and the ease of getting them to believe that a lot of treatment, as in overtreatment, is tantamount to “good care”.
Read more...Is the Piketty Enthusiasm Bubble Subsiding?
Although Piketty’s Capital has garnered a great deal of praise, the criticisms were initially overlooked. They are finally getting the attention they warrant.
Read more...Michael Perelman: The Rise of Free-Trade Imperialism and Military Keynesianism
On the economic and political origins of America’s stealth imperialism and military Keynesianism, as opposed to Keynes’ original version.
Read more...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...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.
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