Economics education — teaching cohorts after cohorts of students useless...
Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This is deeply worrying. A science that doesn’t self-reflect...
View ArticleThe Bayesian folly
Assume you’re a Bayesian turkey and hold a nonzero probability belief in the hypothesis H that “people are nice vegetarians that do not eat turkeys and that every day I see the sun rise confirms my...
View ArticlePoland’s Law and Justice — now and then
A new law passed by Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party and signed by President Andrzej Duda on Feb. 6, means that you may end up in prison for three years if you “publicly and against the facts...
View ArticleThe future — something we know very little about
All these pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-panelled Board Room and a nicely regulated market, are liable to collapse. At all times the vague panic fears and equally vague and unreasoned hopes...
View ArticleMarx and Keynes on the contradictions of capitalism
Each capitalist, Marx noted, has an ambiguous relation to the workers. On the one hand, she wants the workers she employs to have low wages, since that makes for high profits. On the other hand, she...
View ArticleScience and the quest for truth
In my view, scientific theories are not to be considered ‘true’ or ‘false.’ In constructing such a theory, we are not trying to get at the truth, or even to approximate to it: rather, we are trying to...
View ArticleEconomics — a science with wacky views of human behaviour
There is something about the way economists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only...
View ArticleCourage that will live on forever
Seventy-five years ago, on February 22, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl — members of the resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’ — were killed by the Nazis. Courage is not anything very common, and the value...
View ArticleKeynes’ core insight
But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for...
View ArticleKeeping the dream alive
For me, the study of asymmetric information was a very first step toward the realization of a dream. That dream was the development of a behavioral macroeconomics in the original spirit of Keynes’...
View ArticleModels and economics
Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural...
View ArticleKeynes — en sällsynt fågel
Alfred Marshall skrev en gång att “bra ekonomer är sällsynta fåglar.” Det stämmer verkligen. En av dessa sällsynta fåglar var definitivt John Maynard Keynes. Och nu har den norske ekonomiprofessorn...
View ArticleThe biggest trouble with modern macroeconomics
The trouble is not so much that macroeconomists say things that are inconsistent with the facts. The real trouble is that other economists do not care that the macroeconomists do not care about the...
View ArticleVar tog jämlikheten vägen?
Nya data från SCB visar att inkomstskillnaderna i Sverige har fortsatt öka. Gini-koefficienten som år 2005 låg på 0,27 har ökat till 0.32 år 2016. Det är den högsta noteringen sedan mätningarna...
View ArticleOn testing and learning in a non-repetitive world
The incorporation of new information makes sense only if the future is to be similar to the past. Any kind of empirical test, whatever form it adopts, will not make sense, however, if the world is...
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