Category Archives: The dismal science

Philip Pilkington: The Fear Industry – Austrian School Propaganda and the Gold Market

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

When you survey the websites and the pundits of Austrian economics on the internet you tend to get a niggling feeling that they’re trying to sell you something.

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Quelle Surprise! IMF Always Prescribes the Same Austerity Hairshirt

A new paper by Mark Weisbrot and Helene Jorgensen of CEPR have managed to unearth a dirty little secret: the IMF doesn’t just prescribe broadly similar policies in its Article IV consultations, it looks like its hands out the same medicine. We’ve used the metaphor of breaking countries on the rack, but cutting them to fit a Procrustean bed might be more apt.

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The Origins of Neoliberalism Part IV: A Map of Hayek’s Delusion

A recent podcast with Philip Pilkington expanding on a recent piece discussing Hayek and the foundations of neoliberalism got very positive comments, and also covered more ground than his post on this topic on Naked Capitalism, so we thought readers would enjoy it. Plus the Irish accents are a nice change of pace from bland standard ‘Murkican.

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Philip Pilkington: Purging Economics of Religion – A Rebuttal to Robert Nelson’s Defence of The Great Chain of Being

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

While Robert Nelson’s book “Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond” has some remarkable blind spots as far as the quasi-religious nature of neoclassical economics is concerned, it nevertheless opens up an important question: what should economics be, religion or science?

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Philip Pilkington: The Degenerating Discourse of Mainstream Economics

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

The blogoshpere includes quite a few mainstream academic economic blogs. Most of the “debate” on these blogs, together with that in the mainstream academic departments that they mirror, focuses issues of aggregation; issues that have become central to the research paradigm of mainstream economics, which has been falling to ever new lows since the 1970s Rational Expectations “Revolution”.

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Philip Pilkington: The Japanese Stimulus – Will It Work?

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

There’s a lot of talk flying around about the Japanese stimulus. Some appears to be misguided, some appears to be sensible.

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Bill Black: German Growth Goes Negative but Merkel’s Press Remains Glowing

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

It is good to be Angela Merkel.

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