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Monthly Archives: August 2014
Financial Times Contributors Understand ‘Liquidity Trap’ Better Than Neo-Keynesians Like Krugman
I have long complained that the likes of Paul Krugman have grossly misinterpreted the meaning of the term ‘liquidity trap’. These economists seem to think that we are currently in a liquidity trap despite the fact that yields on bonds are … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Theory
6 Comments
On Meta-Analysis in Economics
Did you know that if you are male and eat beans every Tuesday morning at exactly 8.30am you are more likely to marry a supermodel? No. That’s not true. I just made that up. But I hear of statistical studies … Continue reading
Posted in Statistics and Probability
6 Comments
Is There Such Thing as an ‘Economics-Based Psychotic Delusion’?
There is a somewhat well-known phenomenon called Jerusalem Syndrome that has gained some currency in popular culture (you can see some TV clips from the 1990s here). The folk legend goes something like this: people who are perfectly well-balanced psychologically … Continue reading
Posted in Psychology
14 Comments
INET YSI Discussion of a Chapter of My Forthcoming Book
Earlier this week Amogh Sahu set up a INET YSI discussion group to deal with the 4th chapter of my forthcoming book which is entitled ‘Schemata: Abstraction and Modelling’. This is not available yet but I shared a draft with … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Theory, Philosophy
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So-Called ‘Long-Run’ Monetarist Correlations and Non-Ergodicity
Just doing some quick house-cleaning on some previous posts. When I ran regressions plotting the money supply against the CPI I was told that I should average them over 5 year periods because this would supposedly iron out ‘volatility’ and … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Theory, Statistics and Probability
15 Comments
The Backward World of ‘Arguments From Authority’ in Economics
Unlike almost all the other human sciences economics suffers from chronically poor scholarship. Bad habits of citation and scholarship have become so ingrained in the discipline that to not adhere to them is often considered to be poor form or … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Theory, Philosophy
6 Comments
What is a ‘Long-Run Trend’?
Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment. — François de La Rochefoucauld In the comments to my post yesterday on monetarism the notion of the ‘long-run trend’ came up. A regular commenter ivansml insisted that … Continue reading
Posted in Statistics and Probability
6 Comments
Inflation is NOT Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon
Monetarism is a hoary old myth that does its damage in two distinct ways. The first is that, piggybacking on Milton Friedman’s personality, basically an entire generation of economists are actually monetarist in their practical thinking. Greg Mankiw once remarked … Continue reading
Posted in Economic History, Economic Theory
57 Comments
The ‘Information Asymmetry’ Paradigm is Vacuous
Sympathetic Post-Keynesian types often ask me what I think of the whole ‘asymmetric information’ paradigm. They’re often struck when I say that I think that its vacuous. After all doesn’t this paradigm undermine the dreaded General Equilibrium theory? Well yes … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Theory, Psychology
10 Comments
Fixing the Economists 