Tag Archive
Warring Economists and The Great Sleep
I sincerely hope that all of you are now busy exploring your economics textbooks. Really. Well at least I hope you are paying close attention the the war being fought within the economics profession. As arcane as it sounds, that war will affect your lifestyle for years to come. We all have a vested interest… »
Austerity: A Primer. The Ideas Behind The Debate.
In view of the ongoing, and fraught, discussion about austerity measures and their effect, I thought I would present the theories underlying the two sides of debate.
Basically we are going through a rehash of the Orthodox versus Keynes argument that has been an episodic moment for decades. That it remains unresolved is testimony to the… »
A Mockery of It All: Wall Street, The Joke’s On Us
Here I am, late at night reading accounts of the implosion on Wall Street. We are sufficiently past the peak of the crisis that we now have a few good books that explore or describe in detail what went on. They penetrate deep into conversations and exchanges that took place at the epicenter of the… »
The Deficit Debate Continues
Martin Wolf in today’s Financial Times absolutely nails the essentials of the current debate breaking out over our national debt and the federal deficit. I completely endorse his point of view.
I can understand people who are not involved in economic policy discussions making the mistake that we ought to deal with our deficit as a… »
Reform and Economics
Two things come to mind when I watch the ‘debate’ over health care and banking reform, the Senate needs to be fixed, and we need to provide lessons in economics.
The Senate has never been a democratic institution. It was designed with stasis in mind. The over representation of small states is astounding in a country… »
Paul Samuelson and Monetary Policy
By now I am sure most of you will have learned of the Paul Samuelson’s death over the weekend. His reputation inside the economics profession is huge, to say the least, with most people rating him as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, if not all time. For students of my… »
The State of Economics. Hint: Bad.
This next weekend Paul Krugman has an article in the New York Times that I think it is well worth your time reading. It is called: “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?”.
I have inveighed here, in my own inadequate way, many times about how I see the failure of economics as a body of… »