The Assumptions Economists Make - Jonathan Schlefer Economists make confident assertions in op-ed columns and on cable news—so why are their explanations often at odds with equally confident assertions from other economists? And why are all economic predictions so rarely borne out? Harnessing his frustration with these contradictions, Jonathan Schlefer set out to investigate how economists arrive at their opinions. While economists cloak their views in the aura of science, what they actually do is make assumptions about the world, use those assumptions to build imaginary economies (known as models), and from those models generate conclusions. Schlefer takes up current controversies such as income inequality and the financial crisis, for which he holds economists in large part accountable.
The (Many) Things Macroeconomists Don't Know - Justin Fox by Justin Fox | 10:39 AM March 23, 2012 Jean-Claude Trichet, now a few months into retirement, has no regrets about his eight-year tenure as president of the European Central Bank. At least, that’s what he said at Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday night when a student asked him point blank. “I don’t regret anything,” was the response. But listening to the full talk (when there’s video, it will be available here), it was clear that Trichet did regret something about the last few years. He regrets that economists didn’t give him better advice. What Trichet said was that state-of-the-art macroeconomic theory was almost entirely useless in dealing with the crisis that began in 2007. Trichet finally reached for the last refuge of the frustrated economic policymaker: John Maynard Keynes. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. Now, none of this is exactly news.
anti-mankiw Real-World Economics Review real-world economics review Click to subscribe for free and download the current issue Click here to join for free the World Economics Association (founded 2011, 14,500 members) and receive this journal and its sister journals Economic Thought and WEA Chronicles Click here to subscribe for free Current issue Issue no. 99 – 24 March 2022 Keynes’, Piketty’s, and an extensive failure index:Introducing maldevelopment indices Jorge Buzaglo and Leo Buzaglo Olofsgård 2 Externalities, public goods, and infectious diseases Spencer Graves and Douglas Samuelson 25 An essential journey back to the seeds of prosperity in a time of pandemics: Notes for a renewed agenda in development studies Fernando García-Quero and Fernando López Castellano 57 How resource-cheaply could we live well? The role of the IMF in a changing global landscape Jayati Ghosh 80 MMT, post-Keynesians and currency hierarchy: Notes towards a synthesis Luiz Alberto Vieira 90 Why not sovereign money AND job guarantee? download whole issue M.
Economists Who Have Influenced Me | Ha-Joon Chang Many people find it difficult to place me in the intellectual universe of economics. This is not surprising, given that I have been influenced by many different economists, from Karl Marx on the left to Friedrich von Hayek on the right. The Neoclassical school has been the dominant school of economics for the last two generations, so I have also been schooled in it throughout my career. It can provide us with some very useful tools to analyse problems within a given structure, but it is not very good at understanding how the institutions, technologies, politics, and ideas that define that structure evolve over time. In this respect, Hayek is very different from the Neoclassical school, even though many Neoclassical economists mention him in the same breath as Milton Friedman, on the basis that he was one of the most influential advocates of the free market. At the other end of the political spectrum is Karl Marx. I have also been heavily influenced by Herbert Simon.
Post-Autistic Economics Movement Six winners of the Bank of Prize for Economics have written as follows. ". . . economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems" Milton Friedman “[Economics as taught] in 's graduate schools... bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science.” "Existing economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world" Ronald Coase “We live in an uncertain and ever-changing world that is continually evolving in new and novel ways. Douglass North “Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas […] Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data” Wassily Leontief Robert Solow Ian Fletcher ToxicTextbooks.com
Stabilizing an Unstable Economy - Hyman Minsky - McGraw-Hill Education “Mr. Minsky long argued markets were crisis prone. His 'moment' has arrived.†-The Wall Street Journal In his seminal work, Minsky presents his groundbreaking financial theory of investment, one that is startlingly relevant today. He explains why the American economy has experienced periods of debilitating inflation, rising unemployment, and marked slowdowns-and why the economy is now undergoing a credit crisis that he foresaw. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy covers: The natural inclination of complex, capitalist economies toward instability Booms and busts as unavoidable results of high-risk lending practices “Speculative finance†and its effect on investment and asset prices Government's role in bolstering consumption during times of high unemployment The need to increase Federal Reserve oversight of banks
Do Economists Make Markets? This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format Chapter 1 Introduction Monetary Theory at Thirteen Thousand Feet La Paz, January 1986. The young Harvard economist who arrives at the airport has visited twice before, so he knows what to expect: the thin air of Bolivia’s capital, three and a half kilometers above sea level, which will leave him short of breath throughout his visit; the extreme poverty; the beauty of the mountains; the hyperinflation that is beginning. The economist, Jeffrey Sachs, goes on to deliver his advice to Bolivia’s planning minister and then its president. Later, Sachs was to muse on his meager understanding of the country to whose leaders he gave his crucial advice. Nevertheless, commented Sachs, a meager knowledge of the context had not stopped his advice on monetary policy being successful. The Question of Performativity Sachs’s advice to the government of Bolivia is unusual in that it marked the beginning of an exceptional degree of individual influence.
Minksy Archive WELCOME This website is the portal to the papers of the late financial economist Hyman P. Minsky. The papers comprise writings, correspondence, notes, and ephemera. Professor Minsky was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 23, 1919, and died in Rhinebeck, New York, on October 24, 1996. Much of his research centered on understanding and explaining financial crises. From 1949 to 1958 Minsky taught at Brown University, and from 1957 to 1965, at the University of California, Berkeley. HISTORY The Minsky Archive is housed at Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, where Professor Minsky worked for the last six years of his life. Click here to visit the Digital Archive Why do people think economists are charlatans? A couple posts back, I talked about the AEA panel called "What do economists think about major public policy issues?". Actually, I only talked about one of the two papers that was presented there; the other was by Luigi Zingales, and was entitled "Comparing Beliefs of Economists and the Public." Unfortunately, I can't find this paper anywhere online, which is a shame, because it was actually the more interesting of the two. Zingales either performed a survey or reviewed a survey (I can't remember which) that compared economists' and non-economists' positions on policy issues. Update: Ryan Avent of The Economist has a great summary of the findings here, complete with a fun chart, which I will now steal: What on Earth??... Now, maybe this was just an expression of good old American anti-intellectualism, like Insane Clown Posse's views on magnetism, or the Republican party's denial of evolution. I have to say, I have encountered that view a lot. But what do non-economists know about that?
Game Theory: An assessment of the theory that aspires to unify the social sciences Audio is now available here: Download: voice-007.m4a . Listen in conjunction with the slides available here.The talk was delvered on Thursday 10th October 2013, 12:15 to 1:30p at the Lyndon B. Johnson Graduate School of Public Affairs (SRH 3.219/3.216), University of Texas at Austin, Austin Just as physics has its holy grail (A Theory of Everything Natural), so do the social sciences. Like this: Like Loading...