Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Workers, particularly low-paid ones, are regularly sent up in comedy or satire. The 1959 British movie – I’m All Right Jack – was an acidic attack on the British trade union movement although it also parodied the stuffy upper-class British industrialists as well. In 2003, a British author Magnus Mills published the book – The Scheme for Full Employment – which is a satirical attempt to deride Keynesian full employment policies. Boondoggling and leaf-raking is the term that invokes the ultimate put down by the conservatives who laud the virtues of the private sector and accuse the public sector of creating waste and sloth every time someone proposes that the government introduce a large-scale job creation program to alleviate the dreadful damage that mass unemployment causes. Well the New York Times investigative team has discovered the ultimate boondoggle that has been made possible because of slack government policy. And, it involves our friends in the financial markets – those so-called productive, entrepreneurial free marketeers.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
I get several E-mails a month telling me to pull my head in that because, apparently, Ireland is clearly demonstrating my claims that fiscal austerity will kill growth and cause even higher unemployment is plainly wrong – “just look at the data” – is a regular claim by these phantom contact form types. Heroic indeed. They should have realised by now that I love to “look at the data” and are also circumspect about data that will be revised in the course of time. Last week (June 27, 2013), the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) released the March-quarter 2013 National Account estimates – GDP decreased 0.6% (Q1 2013 compared with Q1 2012) – which also revised the December-quarter real growth estimates down to show a contraction. That is three consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth. That should demonstrate some 4.5 years into their fiscal austerity experiment that it isn’t working. Time for change. So, all you phantoms, save your comments until you have something to say that transcends your blind free market ideology. And perhaps, get a life.
The problem of living in Darwin some of the time is that the normal day to day travel that one engages in while pursuing professional life becomes very onerous. It is a four hour flight to any of the capital cities (whereas most were around 1 hour or so from Newcastle). Further, the flight schedules are crazy because Darwin Airport has no curfew (because there is no residential areas nearby) and so you catch planes to and from, say Melbourne at 1.45 in the morning, fly all night, then have to hit the ground running to meet work commitments. This part of Darwin life is very austere. Talking about austerity – in a much more significant way, however – I read that Mr Ed Miliband, thinks he is the 2013 version of Clement Atlee and he can do great and radical “Labour” things in Britain while pursuing a neo-liberal economic austerity program. My immediate reaction was who does he think he is kidding. Sadly, the British Opposition leader seems to think his party can defy basic accounting – that is, reinvent the rules of addition and subtraction – as he tries to present himself as a small target but one imbued with traditional British Labour Party values. The point of this blog is to explain why this neo-liberal bluster is so anti-1945 Labour, without dwelling too much on history. My personal austerity (flying overnight last night) has impinged on my time to wax lyrical today!
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text during 2013 (to be ready in draft form for second semester teaching). Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.
Imagine a patient that goes in for surgery to fix an in-grown toe-nail. She comes out in a wheelchair after the surgeon has trimmed a little more than expected from the toe. The result is she loses her whole leg in the operation. When challenged, the surgeon says that they underestimated how much damage would be caused when they starting trimming the toe-nail and realised too late that they had actually cut her leg off by mistake. The surgeon also admits that they had major differences of opinion with the other specialists involved in the assessment about the extent of the cutting required and the degree to which the surgery would deliver relief to the patient but chose not to disclose that to the patient before hand because they didn’t want to risk slowing down the rush to surgery. After all, surgeons know only one thing – cutting and stitching. The one-legged patient sues the surgeon under tort and the authorities prosecute under criminal law. The surgeon is found guilty of criminal malpractice and negligence, is ordered to pay out millions to the patient and is sent to prison. The reality of professional risk. While the analogy is not perfect it leads to this sort of question: Why should professional economists working for the IMF, the EC and the ECB be above the professional standards and accountability that apply throughout the professional world?
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
We will start with a quiz question today. Its a very hard question so you will have to think long and hard to get the right answer. If you were the government and had the choice of spending $A114,975 per annum (or $A315 per day) to derive zero benefit and cause significant harm to both society and individuals or spending $A63,074 per annum (or $A173 per day) to derive significant benefit with virtually zero harm being caused which option would you take? While the dollar figures are calibrated for the Australian situation, neo-liberal governments around the world have been able to convince us that the first option is superior. There is no logic to it but reflects the extension of the logic that individuals are responsible for themselves and there is no such thing as a macroeconomic or systemic constraint on individual choice and behaviour. It is that folly that is causing all the strife at present and will ultimately bring the system down.
I thought it was hysterical when back in 2009 and 2010 there were papers written and conferences held which carried the theme of the “lessons learned from the crisis”. For example, the – 6th ECB Central Banking Conference (November 2010) – had an array of leading mainstream economists and central bankers telling us what it was all about despite these same characters previously representing a body of work that told us the macroeconomic problem (cycles and unemployment) had been solved. There were lots of papers, Op Eds and media commentary (every day on Fox News and its ilk) warning us of the worst unless governments imposed austerity. Even as recently as the last US election, the “skies are about to fall in” message was prominent and dominated the Republican campaign. Millions of people are unemployed as a result of these economists having sway with policy makers. The evidence denying their predictions etc started to slowly trickle in around 2008 and as the years of this madness have passed the evidence is now a dam break. At this point, the mainstream just talk among themselves and continue to bank their high salaries and take on lucrative consultancies. Denial of facts is their ultimate recourse.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
There was a article in the UK Guardian yesterday (May 21, 2013) – No, Argentina is not a ‘cautionary tale’ for the eurozone. The basic tenet of the article, written by a Greek journalist is that there is no applicable analogy that can be drawn between the experience of Argentina during its crisis in 2001-2002 and the current crisis in Greece. The author rejects any attempts to draw a comparison because Greece would have to introduce a new currency and this would mean no-one would agree to hold it and this would prevent Greece from purchasing essential imports. The author claims that all Argentina had to do was break a pegged arrangement. My view expressed in this blog is that while there are technical differences in the way the monetary system would change in Greece if it abandoned the Euro and what happened in Argentina, the similarities between the two cases are greater. There is an applicable analogy and it scares those who want to hang onto the Euro at all costs.