I think (after a lot of effort) that I’ve internalized Nick Rowe’s modeling of this question (follow links from here) pretty well conceptually. His answer is Yes. There have been thousands of posts and comments across the blogosphere since Nick took Krugman to task on the issue a couple of weeks ago, and Nick has […]

As (mis)conceived by most economists, money (which they confute here with currency) emerged as a solution to the time problem of barter economies: my spinach is ready now, but your apples won’t be ripe for months. How can we trade? Answer: you give me money for my spinach, and I give it back to you […]

Repeat as needed to avoid cognitive dissonance. “Trust” percentage minus “Distrust” percentage: Via: Chart of the Day: Republicans Don’t Trust Anyone (Except Fox News) | Mother Jones. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

I’ve noticed that many others, like me, are puzzled by the mechanics of the Saving=Investment accounting identity. How do household savings get instantly and perfectly intermediated, in a period, into investment spending — the purchase/creation of long-term productive fixed assets? An Aha! for me: According to Krugman’s textbook, they don’t. First a correction: “The savings[sic]-investment […]

I don’t usually link to Paul Krugman because he everyone reads him anyway, right? He doesn’t need my google juice. But I have to make an exception here because he adds to my trove of graphs demonstrating how America today — after thirty years of Reaganomics policies that were supposed to be all about freedom, […]

John Scalzi: …in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. […]

Ever since Bryan offered this bet on future unemployment rates in the U.S. and Europe, I’ve been wondering: how do incarceration rates affect those numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population […]

You hear from lots of people — including lots of economists — that they do. Because they’re monopolistic price-fixers, they distort economic decisions and make us all worse off. The theory makes sense, as far as it goes. But if it were really true you’d expect to see it in the data. This got me […]

Imagine that over the next week (in a closed American economy — the rest of the world has never existed) everyone sold all their financial assets, paid off all their debts, and deposited the remaining money (and any currency they have) in their checking accounts. No money-market funds, even. Just banks with reserve accounts at […]

Neil Wilson has done yeoman’s duty to (perhaps) achieve a convergence that has been too-long delayed. A Double Entry View on the Keen Circuit Model. Steve Keen is, to my knowledge, the only person who is actually encoding a Godley-esque, MMT-style, accounting-based, stock-flow-consistent dynamic simulation model of how economies work. But many MMTers have been […]