Money is an odd book. “Moderation” in the use of a bad measure is no virtue. If cyanide is poison, “drink in small doses” is not the appropriate response. Money falls exactly into this bad pattern.
This article reviews the Fed’s performance with particular emphasis on its contribution to the 2008 crisis and then suggests an alternative policy which, had it been in place would have dampened the most recent boom and bust.
The Google Ngram Viewer is used to highlight some of the ideas, nomenclature, individuals, and events that have come to comprise the Austrian tradition. Key terms and literature are also examined primarily using the English corpus, with occasional examinations using German and French corpus as well. The Ngram counts of these terms provide a useful way to gauge the success of Austrians, over time, to influence the state of economics and the popular debate.
Keynes’s theory of Aggregate Expenditures from the General Theory is examined and criticized. Keynes suggested numerous reasons why his marginal propensity to consume (MPC) might vary across individuals, over different time periods, and might be fundamentally heterogeneous in other respects, but assumed a constant MPC for tractability.
In The Concept of Equilibrium in Different Economic Traditions, Bert Tieben offers a full-length, extensive study of the concept of equilibrium that chronicles its four-century evolution from the prehistory of classical economics to the heyday of neoclassical economics and contemporary heterodox economics.
During the past forty years, nothing has been more popular in the American university than “interdisciplinary work.” Too often, however, the appropriate prefix for “disciplinary” has been “non” rather than “inter.” Doing something “interdisciplinary” offers an expert in field X the opportunity to lavish ignorance on fields Y and Z. Nowhere has this been more evident than in literary people’s flirtations with economics and law, two of the disciplines most frequently paired with their own.
It’s hard to walk away from Brendan Brown’s most recent book without a feeling of deep disappointment in modern day central banks. T
The Keynesian multiplier is a concept embedded in macroeconomic thought, policy, textbooks, and widely taught in classrooms.
This note is built around five issues that center on the damage to economic theory caused by Keynes and his General Theory.
