Primer: Money Neutrality

Note: This article is an excerpt from "Abolish Money (From Economics)! "(chapter 5). The book is available at online bookstores.

Big errors start from smaller ones. In economics, the plausible concepts of money neutrality and the velocity of money have led to many problems. This essay defines these concepts; I discuss the difficulties with them in later sections.

Rigour And Macroeconomics

Much of my writing about macroeconomic theory is of the hand-wringing variety: it cannot be "scientific" because (useful) forecasting is essentially impossible to do. This is a negative (non-constructive) argument; but that does not mean that we cannot be rigorous.

sfc_models Version 0.5 Update

I am heading into what I hope is the final stretch of the "user manual" for the sfc_models package (source: https://github.com/brianr747/SFC_models). As regular readers might suspect, it ended up being longer than I planned for. Whether or not it will be available in time for the MMT conference in September is an open question. Progress this summer was slower than I expected, but that was the result of work on other projects, spending time as a baseball assistant coach (a sport I never played at an organised level!), and travelling. The package itself is essentially frozen; I have reached what will be labelled version 0.5. The next major version will be 1.0, which is all the final changes needed to support the book.

Science And Economics

I had largely managed to avoid writing about the latest angst in the economics blogosphere regarding mathematics, science, and economics. I am not a fan of mainstream economics, but at the same time, I question some of the broad brush attacks on economics. The quest to pretend that economics can be a science like physics is doomed, and does not take into account the nature of what is being studied.

Book Review: GDP

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Professor Diane Coyle offers an interesting popular history of the concept of gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is a mental construct, and is the result of somewhat arbitrary decisions. The book discusses the history of the idea, tied in with economic history as well as the history of economics.

Presentation At MMT Conference

I will be doing a presentation at the First International Conference of Modern Monetary Theory in Kansas City in September 2017 (conference dates are September 21-24, website: http://www.mmtconference.org/). I will be presenting an introduction to my Python stock-flow consistent models package -- sfc_models. This article is a rough draft of what I think the slides will look like.

Book Review: The Reformation In Economics

Philip Pilkington published "The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory" in 2016. It is an ambitious book, outlining the structural flaws of mainstream economic theory. He discusses the potential replacement theory, but this reconstruction is somewhat overshadowed by the deconstruction.