Economics Thoughts & References
Thoughts ...
It's downright criminal that we have people willing to work, lots of capital available for investment, lots of good ideas for wonderful things we could do or produce that would make our lives better and have such a poor understanding of how our economy actually works that we can't put all that together with some sort of government policy to make it all work together. Mostly I blame the mainstream economists who start with perfectly ordinary uncontroversial equations that describe the economy and then concoct incredible, unverifiable, historically inaccurate theories about the causal relationships that they think might exist between variables. They maintain these fictions even in the face of empirical evidence that the relationships they suggest simply do not hold. They suggest policies based on their theories which either do nothing or have unintended or detrimental impacts on the economy. And when things go wrong, as often as not they will suggest that we take even more extreme action of the same sort that just didn't work. Incredible!
A real science of economics must come out of the Ivory Tower and become first and foremost an empirical science. In the face of facts that attempts to manipulate the money supply simply don't work, we must throw out monetarist theories and look for others that do hold in the real world. We must always be wary of easy and false analogies like comparing the government's debt with that of any other business or household. They just are not the same and such analogies lead us to make really bad choices.
My Thoughts about Economics
I've started to capture my thoughts about economics in blog form. You can find an archive of all my macroeconomics posts starting in 2011 here.
Economics Papers I've written
The link below is to a paper describing a rule of thumb relationship between percentage changes in GDP, the Labor Force, Productivity, and the absolute change in the unemployment rate. This is a rule described by Bill Mitchell in his blogs that I re-derived in this paper.
Here is a somewhat longer paper describing my general take on macroeconomic theory:
Money, Credit, Debt, Deficits, National Debt, and China.pdf
Other Interesting References
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) seems to be the most sane analysis of economics that I've found. See:
