"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Involving ideas of the classical economists together with those of the marginal utility revolution of 1870
Recently, I suggested that the members of the Biden Administration needed to take a remedial course in basic economics. Fundamental to the understanding of that subject are the four classical … Read More
Is the world becoming a less free place for human beings? Just how much human freedom can we find in each of the world’s countries? I suspect many people would … Read More
American progressives have a real problem. Somehow, they must figure out how to finance the huge new social programs they would like to impose on us. Lately, a number of … Read More
Like-minded thinkers: Thomas Robert Malthus (13 February 1766 — 29 December 1834), English cleric, scholar, and economist; and Thomas Piketty (7 May 1971 — ), French economist Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons / … Read More
An Indian plowman in West Bengal working in India’s largest industry: Agriculture Wikimedia Commons / ILRI In my last two posts, I have taken looks at the history of leftist … Read More
The four greatest neoclassical economic philosophers: from top left clockwise, Adam Smith (Wikimedia Commons / Scottish National Gallery), J.B.Say (Wikimedia Commons), Carl Menger (Wikimedia Commons / Mises.org) , and David Ricardo(Wikimedia Commons … Read More
Left: Jean-Baptiste Say (5 January 1787 – 15 November 1832), Wikimedia Commons Right: John Maynard Keynes (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), Wikimedia Commons / National Portrait Gallery At … Read More
A wartime factory worker in 1940s Fort Worth, Texas Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division On opening up my online edition of the Wall Street Journal this morning, … Read More
Particularly notable dirigistes from the past. From top-left clockwise: King Louis XIV of France, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini Image Credits from top-left clockwise: Wikimedia Commons/Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons/John Jabez … Read More
Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister of Spain, addresses supporters in the 2011 electoral campaign Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/manulqsa After the success of the Leave side in the Brexit election last Thursday, … Read More
The Emperor has no new clothes! Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Vilhelm Pedersen (1820-1859) Given all their failures in suggesting successful economic policies around the world, one would have thought … Read More
The School of Athens, a place for the development of ideologies Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Raphael (1505) Many of the people with whom I have talked over my lifetime, if indeed not most, hated the … Read More
Joko Widodo, President of Indonesia Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Government of Indonesia For a country that is widely reputed to have a lot of crony capitalism, Indonesia is pretty lucky to … Read More
Ottoman depiction of the siege of Vienna by Muslim forces in 1529. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/”Istanbul”, Hachette, Collection “Voir” (PD-Art) It is rapidly becoming obvious to a number of people that … Read More
A modern day view of economists. By Rembrandt – The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons The … Read More
The University of Chicago, where much of New Classical Economics was built by Robert Lucas, Jr. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons In my last post I began an examination of what … Read More
Adam Smith (1723-1790), founder of classical economics, which has flowered into New Classical Economics Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/By Unknown – http://www.nationalgalleries.org/object/PG 1472, Public Domain At this time in history, the … Read More
Adam Smith, the builder of a majestic Gothic cathedral of economic thought. by John Kay (1742-1826)/Library of Congress (PD-1996) This is the second of two posts on the applicability of … Read More
Organization of a feedback loop Wikimedia Commons/Brews ohare – Own work My friend Chease has again proposed I consider a very interesting article concerning Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. Last August … Read More
Mario Draghi, President of ECB, and Haruhiko Kuroda, Governor of BOJ Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons/World Economic Forum and Asian Development Bank Now there are two central banks living in Alice’s … Read More
The wreck of an elegant model! Photo Credit: Flickr.com/Kevin Hutchinson The New Keynesian economics is such an elegant mental construct that it is … Read More
Demolition Explosion! Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Energy I am beginning to see suggestions that it is time to blow up New Keynesian economics to smithereens … Read More
They don’t pay me enough! Photo Credit: Flickr.com/Bitterjug OK, everyone! Put on your thinking caps because we are going to be doing some serious macroeconomics thinking. … Read More
We may be approaching in economics what Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (reference [S2]), called a paradigm shift. Kuhn laid out scientific history in … Read More
I was inspired to write this post by a person named Cai in a comment on Clouds and Global Warming. Not that the suggestive part of Cai’s comment had anything to … Read More
Having given the institutional composition and powers of the Federal Reserve, and having given our opinion on what it should be doing and why, we will now look at what it … Read More
In order to understand why the Federal Reserve has chosen its policies of the past three decades, we need to understand the New Keynesians. The response by neoclassical economists to the … Read More
Once the basic institutional facts about the Federal Reserve System have been presented, any discussion of the Fed should begin with a discussion of monetarism. After all, the Fed’s primary … Read More
When we left this discussion, we had found that a Keynesian economist believes government stimulus spending must be used to kick-start (pump-prime?) the economy out of recession.
Neoclassical economists on the other hand believe care must be taken not to damage an already distressed economy further.
Quite possibly the most consequential ideological conflict within Western nations today is the battle of economic ideas between Keynesian and neoclassical thought. Since Keynesian ideas mandate greater power and a larger … Read More
