Thoughts On Economics

"My impression is that the best and brightest in the profession proceed as if economics is the physics of society. There is a single un...

"The best way to evaluate any economic theory is to consider the theorist as a magician. Theorists rarely make logical errors in moving...

I have rewritten my demonstration of some errors in Austrian business cycle theory. In addition to making this article available on the Soc...

I don't know that these usages have anything to do with Adam Smith. I don't even vouch for the translation from the seventeenth cent...

Apparently young American liberals still feel obligated to take ignorant cold war stands. Here's Ezra Klein , in a post positioning hims...

Joan Robinson had lots to say about the Cambridge Capital Controversy. I find this remark to be amusing: "I was delighted to find in a ...

"Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market econom...

Tyler Cowen purports to analyze why the pay of CEOs has increased so much. "It is useless to ask what is the source of natural inequal...

Some mainstream economists (e.g., Bliss and Hahn) responded to the Cambridge Capital Controversy by taking their stand on the Arrow-Debreu v...

Paul's done this sort of amusing thing before: "Now as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: ...

Inside Higher Ed has an article about heterodox economics. Some of those quoted and others have commented. A blogger is hosting a readi...

Marc Lavoie's article "Do Heterodox Theories Have Anything in Common? A Post-Keynesian Point of View" ( Intervention , V. 3, N...

I steal half the title from James Galbraith . Italy is a foreign country, and, besides, Paolo Sylos Labini is dead: "At the beginning o...

5.0 Return to a Special Case This post continues the examination of a cobweb cycle with a non-linear demand curve. In this part, I talk aga...

Today's New York Times , in the science section, contains an ad for the "Von Neumann Memorial Lectures". This reminded me that...

1.0 Introduction This post duplicates an example in Richard M. Goodwin's Chaotic Economic Dynamics (Oxford University Press, 1990). At ...

A couple of posts from Sean Carroll led me to recall some of the interactions between economists and mathematical physicists. One interact...

Some time ago I mentioned Philip Ball's commentary on Gallegati, Keen, and Lux's critique of econophsyics. Cosma Shalizi now has r...

This seems hard to credit: "if current graduate students know anything of price theory, it would have had to have been self-taught, bec...

I simple way of deciding whether one wants to persue reading a paper or book is to look at its bibliography. If it is on a topic that one is...