This material is taken from first 15 minutes of Michael Hudson’s Webinar: a 4000-year perspective on economy, money and debt. Shortlink: http://bit.ly/MHudson4000. These are real-world economics lessons, not found in textbooks. A ten-minute video wrap-up is followed by a 1400 word writeup/summary. Loans to 3rd World Meant for Control Michael Hudson’s First Wall Street Job… Read More What they don’t teach in economics textbooks

Most economists are committed to Friedman’s methodology which advocates a nominalist philosophy of science. Theories do not aim to discover hidden real structures which explain the observations. Instead, they aim to “save the appearances”: provide a good match to the observations. Although a small minority of voices has advocated a realist methodology – Bhaskar Roy,… Read More Hockey Stick or Growth Illusion?

In previous posts/articles, I have argued that the fundamental problems at heart of economics lie in a hopeless methodology which is systematically incapable of reaching the truth; see How Economic Models Became Substitutes for Reality and The WHY of Crazy Models. This is also aligned with views of Tony Lawson and others who offer critical realism as… Read More Why Newton Matters?

TRADE WARS AFTER CORONAVIRUSEconomic, political and theoretical implicationsA webinar from the WEA Friday May 28, 2021.   5pm-7pm,  London Time.    LINK:  meet.google.com/nxr-ucuj-agf      1. WELCOME. Maria Alejandra Madi, Chair WEA Conference Programme 2. PRESENTATIONS America’s Trade Deficits: Blame U.S. Policies – Starting with Tax LawsKenneth E. AustinUniversity of Maryland The interplays of… Read More WEA WEBINAR THIS WEEK: TRADE WARS

TRADE WARS AFTER CORONAVIRUSEconomic, political and theoretical implicationsA webinar from the WEA Friday May 28, 2021.   5pm-7pm,  London Time.    LINK:  meet.google.com/nxr-ucuj-agf     1. WELCOME. Maria Alejandra Madi, Chair WEA Conference Programme 2. PRESENTATIONS America’s Trade Deficits: Blame U.S. Policies – Starting with Tax Laws Kenneth E. AustinUniversity of Maryland The interplays of… Read More WEA WEBINAR THIS WEEK: TRADE WARS AFTER CORONAVIRUS

Invited Lecture at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, on 22 Apr 2021. ABSTRACT: A materialistic approach to life locates problems in external reality, and attempts to find technological, political, or economic solutions. This represents a misdiagnosis which makes cures impossible to find. The anthropocene was brought about by the spiritual stunting now widespread across the… Read More Becoming the Change You Want to See

The current vaccination scenario calls for a reflection on the conceptualization of underdevelopment as a process of dependency. Nowadays, to understand the big picture of the production and trade of vaccines, for instance, it is necessary to consider the analysis of the dynamics of the world-wide capitalist system. Indeed, the access to vaccines has put… Read More Vaccines and underdevelopment as dependency

{bit.ly/RSIA10A} In previous lectures (Causal Explanation of Autonomy & Invariance of Regression Relationships ), we have seen the essential importance of analyzing the causal structure of the variables under study via path diagrams. In this lecture, we study one aspect of this which creates serious problems for understanding and interpreting regression results. This is the problem… Read More Spurious Regressions

While the study of wicked problems is not new, there is a need to develop a broader understanding of its scope in policies under the paradigm of complexity. The origin of the term “wicked Problem” goes back to Rittel and Webber’s (1973) questioning of the validity of technical-scientific approaches in social policy and urban planning.… Read More WICKED PROBLEMS IN ECONOMIC POLICY

As discussed by Hoover in “Lost Causes”, the concept of causality was dropped from econometrics for many decades, although it is currently making a resurgence. Nonetheless the revolution launched by Judea Pearl in the 1990’s has not percolated to econometrics textbooks. As a result, satisfactory definitions of key concepts required to make sense of regression… Read More Causal Explanation of Autonomy & Invariance of Regression Relationships