Economics

Manchester University’s Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES) released a report recently into the way economics is currently taught at Manchester, which is relevant to economics teaching at universities worldwide.

From the RBA today: The Reserve Bank of Australia has launched this year’s RBA/ESA Economics Competition, in conjunction with the Economic Society of Australia (ESA) and the UNSW Economics Society.

The media attention surrounding French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century is growing ever more fervent.

Imagine a modern economics textbook comprising of three parts, with the last two being Analysis and Modern Problems.

One strange claim in the economic debate that followed the financial crisis was the impact of uncertainty on the path of investment and subsequently the recovery in economic activity.

Cross-posted from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism.

I want to show how the morality on display in the movie 300, in which babies are cast into a chasm for minor deformities or other weaknesses and illnesses, is easily compatible with utilitarian logic.

We commonly use stories to teach new ideas, but all too often end up taking the wrong lessons from them.

Mason Gaffney has for years been describing the nature of economic rents and its relation to taxation. His key idea, which would have been uncontroversial prior to the rise of the neoclassical school, is that all taxes come out of rents (ATCOR).

I was in a seminar recently where the presenter explored some trends in income inequality in Australia, Canada and the US over the past century.

I am reading Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy by Henry George (free ebook available here).

Alex Tabarrok, who I rarely agree with, has recently argued his moral position on open borders here.

The ignorance of many highly experienced economists to the moral foundations of their work is quite alarming.

This post was sparked by a piece over at The Drum (ABC) by the CIS’s Matthew Taylor. Taylor’s argument, which is repeated by many others of similar political disposition (such as Adam Creighton) is that relative poverty doesn’t matter, only ‘absolute’ poverty.

The fanfare surrounding organ markets within the economics community is often extreme.

In my rather long introductory post on the new theory of the firm I developed with Brendan Markey-Towler, I listed many important characteristics of our model.

I don’t know how best to say it, so here it goes – the current mainstream theory of the firm is dodgy.

As my online debates with ‘well-trained’ economists continue with full force I will again use this blog as an outlet to expand on arguments that can’t be made in 140 characters or less, or those that simply attract religiously-held views via comment pages.

The idea of the market as ‘information aggregator’ is, like many ideas, probably as old as humanity itself, but Friedrich Hayek is usually credited with popularising the idea in his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

“We are borrowing from the future” is a common phrase you might hear from economists musing about the state of the economy; about the behaviour of individuals, businesses and especially of government.

I was motivated to write this post by fellow Australian young economist Gabriela D’Souza “After Taking Economics, Students Become More Selfish and Expect Worse of Others” Well that’s just common sense. — Gabriela D’Souza (@gabster0191) October 24, 2013 I disagree.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2013 (remember there is no actual Nobel Prize for economics) has gone to three men that share a theme: asset prices.

John Roskam of The Institute of Public Affairs appears today at the AFR to defend Republican maneuvres in the US and ideological politics in general: It says a great deal about modern-day democracy in Australia and America that some politicians now think they can insult another politician by calling them “ideological”.

This is one area of economics that really bugs me.

I have often railed against the economic approach to social organisation problems which can be described as ‘assume first ask questions later’.