Category Archives: Science and Explanation

John Greenwood and Steve H. Hanke’s “The Monetary Bathtub is Overflowing”

In an article in the 10/21/2021 Wall Street Journal, John Greenwood and Steve H. Hanke evoked an image with which we are all familiar, water flowing in and out of a bathtub. The simple image was to be representative of monetary flows, and it attracts attention, which is good thing; however, Macroeconomic Field theory finds it more instructive and necessary to put forth a more adequate representative image of flows, called the Diagram of Rates of Flow. Continue reading →

Stagflation Demystified

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The general form of so-called stagflation is more money chasing fewer goods in the basic circuit and a dearth of investment in the surplus circuit to keep pace with the strong basic demand. (Click here)

Lonergan gave one theoretical example of stagflation – without calling it that – wherein the condition of equilibrium between the circuits of the process is violated: Continue reading →

“The Most Significant Book of the Twentieth Century”

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A quote from [McShane, 2017, Preface xii]: “I have brought you face to face with the first page of the most significant book of the twentieth century.* … You are on the edge of the invention of the permanent science of econo-dynamics. What is your next move? Obviously, if you are an economist, you get moving towards a Nobel Prize.” Continue reading →

Paul H. Rubin’s “The Woke Left’s Primitive Economics”

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The Wall Street Journal of 10/6/2021 featured Paul H. Rubin’s article, “The Woke Left’s Primitive Economics”. Rubin makes several valid points in a) criticizing The Woke’s and the Marxist’s simple-minded, psycho-political, self-damaging, hate-and-envy macroeconomics, and b) recognizing that new and better human and material capital benefit the entire society. We wish Rubin had explicitly and clearly a) legitimized by nuanced theory the practical balance of taxation and spending for responsible waste-free activities, which only we, in our governmental form as We-The-People, can perform, and b) stated specifically that the level of taxation and the incidence of stratified taxation depend upon the requirements of the current phase of an economic expansion – Is it an initial non-expanding static economy, a proportionate expansion, a surplus expansion, a basic expansion, or a higher non-expanding static economy? Continue reading →

Economics Is Economics, Sociology Is Sociology, Politics Is Politics; A Is a Distinct Science; It Is neither B nor C

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On Friday, October 8, N. Gregory Mankiw’s Blog featured Nick Romeo’s interesting article entitled “Is It Time For a New Economics Curriculum?” Greg provided a quote from Romeo’s paragraph re Jonathan Gruber’s take on CORE.

Jonathan Gruber, who teaches introductory economics at M.I.T., felt that CORE might introduce too much complexity for a foundational course. He worried that so much emphasis on the ethical and political dimensions of economics might make the subject feel like a different discipline altogether. “The question is, do you want the students to feel like they’re coming out of, you know, to be blunt, a sociology class or an economics class?” Gruber said.

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Bootcamp To Educate the House, Senate, Federal Reserve, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, Especially Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell

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One Week Bootcamp

Restricted to persons with solid backgrounds in mathematics and the natural sciences

Topics

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How’s She Cuttin’ ? How’s The New Money Circulatin’ ?

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How’s it goin’ ?

How’s she cuttin’ ?

How’s she cuttin’? This phrase comes from farmers asking about the conditions for hay or crop cutting during the harvest season and has since been adopted across Ireland to be a way to ask how you are. (Google)

How’s the new money circulatin’ ? Continue reading →

Resistance Of Macroeconomists To New and Better Ideas

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Macroeconomists should be scientists seeking better explanations of the economic process of production and exchange.

By “scientific development” I mean development in mathematics or natural science. The scientific horizon recedes, expands when there occurs a crisis in existing methods, procedures, theories, assumptions which are seen to fail. They cannot handle known results, known observations or data, known conclusions. … Thus we have the triple revolution of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud; the revolutions effected by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, quantum theory; the revolution in mathematics that began with analytic geometry and the calculus, went on to Riemannian geometry, and then to the developments in algebra due to Galois and to later developments In these cases there was a radical revision in concepts. (CWL 10, 92-3)

In the following passage, substitute “macroeconomists” for “scientists; and substitute “scientific macroeconomics” for “science.” Continue reading →

Commonsense Economics vs. Scientific Economics

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A sound theory is a good thing to keep around. Clerk-Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and Kirchoff’s laws of electric circuits are good systematics to consult when one is designing a system to deliver electricity. Similarly, when one is seeking to understand, affirm, and manage the economic process, a reliable, scientific macroeconomics, which both explains how the process actually works and yields norms for adaptation by human participants, is a good thing to have around.

Common sense is different from science. Common sense describes; science explains. Common sense relates things to us; science relates things to one another. And scientific Macroeconomic Field Theory, also called Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics, is different from the mere commonsense compilation of descriptive accounting aggregates called Gross Domestic Product. Continue reading →