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Can we avoid another financial crisis?
In 2008, conventional economics led us blindfolded into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Almost a decade later, with the global economy wallowing in low growth that they can’t explain, mainstream economists are reluctantly coming to realise that their models are useless for understanding the real world.
As I explain in this video, government attempts to turn University entrance into a marketplace have had the unintended side-effect of undermining pluralist economics. The UK government has removed controls on the number of places that Universities can offer in first year courses, and as a result there has been an increase in humanities places offered by highly ranked Universities. Final year high school students have flocked to these Universities, and enrolments at lower-ranked Universities have fallen substantially.
A new organisation called NEKS (for “New Economic Knowledge Services”, see www.neks.ltd) is holding its inaugural conference on the economics of infrastructure In Westminster on Tuesday January 24th, and you should attend.
Why NEKS, and why Infrastructure? The economic importance of infrastructure is obvious, but the actual performance of infrastructure often differs radically from what is predicted when it is being planned. Three forms of delusion make many infrastructure projects far less beneficial than expected by their proponents: the complexity of execution is underestimated, the benefits are overestimated, and benefits are also calculated poorly using dodgy economic theory.
This is a talk I gave in Amsterdam to launch the Amsterdam Rethinking Economics critique of the current state of economics “education” in the Netherlands. The text of my slides is reproduced below.
–Read the original sources—journals & books—not textbooks
–Rules of accounting versus Money Multiplier
I’ve had some tough interviews over the years (such as the BBC HARDtalk! interview earlier this year with Stephen Sackur), but I’d have to credit the student interviewers at the University of Amsterdam’s Room for Discussion event with giving me the toughest, well-informed grilling my ideas have had in public. I’m following up later today with a keynote speech at the Dutch Rethinking Economics event tonight, and I’ll post that here later this week.
Apparently it’s the fifth anniversary of the day I gave this talk, to the Occupy movement in Sydney, in Martin Place, right outside the offices of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The day after, the site was shut down by the police. It seems I was jinxed, because the same thing happened in New York, the day after I simply dropped off a couple of copies of my book Debunking Economics. The speech holds up pretty well, though I’ve developed my technical arguments a lot since then.
I have observed and appreciated Olivier Blanchard’s intellectual journey over the last decade. It began in August 2008, with what must be regarded as one of the worst-timed papers in the history of economics. In a survey of macroeconomics entitled “The State of Macro”, he concluded, one year after the financial crisis began, that “The state of Macro is good” (Blanchard, 2008). However, Blanchard did not remain locked into that position, and he had the rare intellectual courage to say so in public and in academic papers. His most recent post, before the one I am responding to today (“Further Thoughts on DSGE Models: What we agree on and what we do not”), stated that, far from the state of macro being good:
In my last post on my Debtwatch blog, I finished by saying that the Physiocrats were the only School of economics to properly consider the role of energy in production. They ascribed it solely to agriculture exploiting the free energy of the Sun, and specifically to land, which absorbed this free energy and stored it in agricultural products. As Richard Cantillon put it in 1730:
The Land is the Source or Matter from whence all Wealth is produced. The Labour of man is the Form which produces it: and Wealth in itself is nothing but the Maintenance, Conveniencies, and Superfluities of Life. (Cantillon, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce in Général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General)
This interview, which was just recorded today, will go to air tomorrow. The broadcast details are:
BBC News Channel: 02.30 BST, 04.30 BST and 20.30 BST Tuesday 16th August 2016, and 00.30 BST Wednesday 17th August 2016
And from the 04.30 TX it will then be available within the UK on BBC iPlayer for one year.
BBC World News Channel: 03.30 GMT; 08.30 GMT; 14.30 GMT and 19.30 GMT Tuesday 16th August 2016
It will also go out at numerous timeslots on Friday on the BBC World Service.
For decades, mainstream economists have reacted to criticism of their methodology mainly by dismissing it, rather than engaging with it. And the customary form that dismissal has taken is to argue that critics and purveyors of alternative approaches to economics simply aren’t capable of understanding the mathematics the mainstream uses. The latest instalment of this slant on non-mainstream economic theory appeared in Noah Smith’s column in Bloomberg View: “Economics Without Math Is Trendy, But It Doesn’t Add Up”.
Figure 1: Noah’s tweet announcing his blog post
