The People's Economics

In the introduction to this blog I pointed out that for many people the need for new ideas in economics leads them to come up with a very old idea. If they were in charge they would set things to rights. The trouble with this is that it tends to assume that the behaviour of everyone else wouldn’t ch...

Does discounting the future at a rate of 1 to 2 percent make any sense? Isn't the choice between a discount rate of about 5% or not applying a discount rate at all?

Is the Socratic Method a good way of discussing a topic? Or is it just likely to irritate your opponent.

Do you think of professional as primarily meaning 'having a high level of a skill'. Or does it also imply consistency and substitutability between practitioners.

If you were asked to predict someone's future performance would you think of taking regression to the mean into account? Would doing so cause more problems than it solves?

Who do you think of when the 1% is mentioned? Is it misleading to apply this to the global richest !% by wealth (which includes a lot of moderately well off people in the developed countries)

The introduction indicates that this is likely to be much more than just a straightforward biography of Ørsted, looking at how he fitted in with the various philosophical ideas (in particular those of Kant) as well as looking at how other commentaries on Ørsted have questioned his priority in disco...

I knew of Ørsted as giving his name to one of the many units of electromagnetism, and I looked at this book because I'm always interested in biographies of scientists. The blurb for this book suggests, however, that Ørsted was much more than just another name in electromagnetism - he started the su...

It's a short book, so the sample is fairly short, but it does seem to be going in the direction I was hoping, and brings up a couple of interesting points. Firstly is creative destruction really necessary? Could we have more steady economics progress without a constant worry that the business you w...

Creative destruction seems to me to be a very important concept in economics. To move forward we have to dismantle some of the existing productive capacity, and this might seem like a negative step. How can this be reconciled? Do there need to be mechanisms to ensure that the coming of new technolo...