Understanding Money – a non-technical account of the essential role money and its creation plays in a modern economy. This article was previously available as a pdf, but I have now posted it as a blog in its own right. Since it was originally written in 2010, I have made a few revisions and additions. Introduction […]
Category: Economics
‘Aggregate Demand, Idle Time, and Unemployment’ – A Critique of Michaillat and Saez Introduction Like all neoclassical models, that of Michaillat and Saez (2014) referred to in Simon Wren-Lewis’s Mainly Macro blog on 16th August fails to model money realistically. This renders their model incoherent and in any case incapable of encompassing one of the […]
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Independence is Nominal
Independence is Nominal – long-gestated thoughts given birth to in response to Brian Barder’s blog post on the lack of post Scottish referendum preparedness and the need for the UK coalition government to resign if there is a ‘Yes’ vote. Here I am, up in Scotland and strangely detached from the debate. (For comparison I […]
‘Modern Thinking: Atomism and Communication’ – Although written four years ago for an essay competition, I still think this piece encapsulates as well as anything my approach to economics, politics and social institutions. Bertrand Russell, the great British mathematician and philosopher, believed that to be ‘modern-minded’ was to make the error of thinking with the […]
The causes of unemployment make it a moral issue. Radical solutions are required. In an earlier post I noted some features of unemployment from a UK perspective. The main thrust was that a fairly constant proportion of the population in employment (around 72% of those of working-age) hides a serious decline in the availability of […]
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The Real Wealth of Fizz
Amol Rajan, whom I have had cause to praise previously, wrote last week about Coca-Cola’s self-serving ‘anti-obesity campaign’. While much of what he writes is refreshingly scathing, I would take issue with the following statement: [Coke] is a massive corporation that exists to make huge profits. This is fine by me, because I like big corporations: […]
As Kawan Patel suggested on LabourList a few days ago, New Labour was founded on the idea that while Margaret Thatcher might not have ‘saved the nation’ as her Conservative supporters claim, there were things she ‘got right’. I believe that this focus on the specifics of the Thatcherite legacy, such as privatisation and reductions […]
There’s a funny little Panglossian piece by Tory peer and former minister Michael Bates on ConservativeHome. If it’s any indication of the thinking going on among ministers at present, however, it’s deeply worrying. The ex-Paymaster General displays an extraordinary lack of understanding of basic economic accounting and logic. His main idea is that despite the […]
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Unemployment and Policy
This post is on 2 pages. Please click on the appropriate page number at bottom of text to navigate. There’s a very interesting take on UK unemployment trends in the July NIESR Review, written by the NIESR director Jonathan Portes. One should perhaps bear in mind that he has previously worked to formulate employment policy […]
Tim Worstall v. PositiveMoney I note an interesting little discussion between Tim Worstall and Ralph Musgrave on money creation in the context of the Northern Rock bank crisis of 2007. Essentially Tim was claiming, against the PositiveMoney view, that the failure of the bank was evidence that it was not possible for banks to create […]