Entries by Ed Walker

Black Lives Matter

I was at the Netroot Nations candidates session listening to Martin O’Malley with other writers from Emptywheel in a cavernous hall with terrible acoustics and wildly over-amped speakers. We had already heard the moderator tell his story; his high pitched voice was hard on my ears, and the racketing speakers compounded the misery. Suddenly a […]

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Mankiw’s Principles of Economics Part 3: Rational People Think At The Margin

The introduction to this series is here. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Mankiw’s third principle: Rational People Think At The Margin. His definition is: Rational people systematically and purposefully do the best they can to achieve their objectives, given the available opportunities.” Principles of Macroeconomics 6th Ed. at 6 He defines marginal […]

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European Neoliberals Crushed the Leftist Party in Greece

Two of the most depressing interviews I have ever seen are the Jacobin interview with Stathis Kouvelakis and the New Statesman interview with Yanis Varoufakis in the wake of the Greek referendum and the capitulation of Prime MInister Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party. Kouvelakis is a member of the Left Platform in Syriza, Tsipras’ […]

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Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics 1: People Face Trade-offs

The introduction to this series is here. The first of the Ten Principles of Economics laid down by N. Gregory Mankiw is “People Face Trade-Offs”. Principles of Macroeconomics, 6th Ed. 2012, p. 4. In language more suited to a high school textbook than a best-selling college textbook, he provides several examples. If you study economics […]

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Euros, Dollars and Morals

The Greek people overwhelmingly rejected the austerity demanded by the European Elites on Sunday, and the media filled up with opinions about what should happen, and predictions for what will happen, none of which is worth a bucket of spit. What we do know is that whatever happens next will mean more misery for the […]

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Revolutionary Changes in Economics

In this series, I tried to learn what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions meant for economics. In this post, I suggested a possible paradigm for neoliberal economic theory. It uses the Ten Principles of Economics preached by N. Gregory Mankiw in his best-selling economics textbook, the general principle of maximization of economic efficiency, […]

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Kuhn and Economics: A Summary

In a series of posts which you can find here, I have been trying to formulate an answer to the question why has neoliberal economics not been tossed out in the wake of its total failure as demonstrated by the Great Crash. I’ve used as a lens Thomas Kuhn’s seminal essay: The Structure of Scientific […]

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Paradigm Change Through Authority and Arguments about Truth

So far in this series, we have encountered a number of answers to my central questions: why hasn’t neoliberal economic theory been thrown out as a result of its horrifying failure? Why hasn’t the paradigm change theory of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution worked? If Kuhn were right, then the utter failure of […]

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