Thoughts On Economics

Who are the greatest economists of, say, the last fifty years? I suggest the shortlist for many academic economists would include Kenneth A...

I consider this post to be a complement to some recent comments by Lars Syll on this year's Nobel prize. I here outline an (unorigin...

1.0 Introduction I have previously discussed Sraffa's review of Prices and Production , Hayek's reply, and Sraffa's rejoinder. ...

I have argued before that weaknesses in mainstream economics exposed by our current macro-economic problems have been known for decades. I ...

Joan Robinson, drawing on John Maynard Keynes, famously distinguished between models set in historical and logical time. Geoffrey Hodgson, n...

Stephen Williamson quotes Narayana Kocherlakota, apparently a very stupid person: "Kocherlakota says this...: 'But over the long ru...

"One of the embarrassing dirty little secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as economic theory properly so-called. There ...

1.0 Introduction Joan Robinson famously distinguished between economic models set in logical and historical time. According to Robinson, the...

Consider Andrew W. Lo and Mark T. Mueller's draft paper "WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!" , to appear i...

I have added the blog of some economists at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to my blogroll. That blog is more policy-oriented than t...

1.0 Introduction One can hold savings in various forms of assets. In effect, savings is a time machine for transferring purchasing power int...

1.0 Introduction The point of the experiment described here is to offer empirical evidence for the importance of the distinction between unc...

Kevin "Angus" Grier reminisces about Hyman Minsky's dislike for Piero Sraffa. But he doesn't recall points at issue. Mins...

I recently read Peter Dorman's "Waiting for an Echo: The Revolution in General Equilibrium Theory and The Paralysis in Introductory...

Hayek had a good argument about the difficulties of central planning. The planners do not have a mechanism for using tacit knowledge distrib...

1.0 Introduction Brian Arthur and Paul David, two teachers at Stanford about a decade ago, have attracted a certain amount of popular attent...

Anybody interested in institutional economics should be interested in evolutionary theory, a theory that I can stand to learn more about. Th...

Last month, I noted resemblances between Soros' concept of "reflexivity" and Davidson's use of non-ergodicity to formaliz...

The New York Times a couple of weeks ago profiled George Soros, the billionaire financial speculator, philanthropist, and student of Karl P...

Consider an economic model in which the agents within the model act on decisions based on their understanding of the model. For ease of expo...