Dan Davies: made up numbers are just pretend. Once more they awarded a Nobel Prize (in Economics, but still) at least partly for something I consider to be actually embarrassing. In this case, the practice of carrying out econometrics using an “index” of “institutions” on the left hand side. (more)

Dan Davies: gordon ramsay's policy nightmares. In the Kitchen Nightmares model, a key stage is the gathering together of all the stakeholders to build a consensus that there is a specific problem which needs to be solved, and agreement that this is going to be the priority. (more)

Dan Davies: seeing like a screwdriver. I, somewhat foolishly, got into an argument on social media last week with someone over the slogan “POSIWID” (more)

Dan Davies: every accounting system is a mental prison. A few weeks ago, it was announced that a British government Department was going to be forbidden by the Treasury from undertaking any capital expenditure without prior permission (more)

ramsay's regional policy nightmares (slight return). I find myself once more thinking about my regular bugbears in economic geography, and particularly about “scatterplot agglomerationism”, the belief that the single factor which accounts for economic productivity is either size, population density or some gerrymandered version of adjusted population density which takes into account transport times. (2024-09-20-DaviesMeVersusTheScatterplots) (more)

Gregory Barber: The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free? The phrase—“local-first software”— had an artisanal, farm-to-table sort of ring, at once familiar and flicking at something new. Perhaps some engineers dismissed it as merely a marketing term. But others whittling away their workday afternoons seemed to see it as the solution to a problem they had long sensed: The software they were writing was broken. (more)

like a Personal Server/hosted server, but made up of mesh of functions running in various parts of the cloud. cf serverless (more)

Web Server that runs on your local machine (DeskTop, Lap Top, Mobile/PDA) (more)

aka Mercantilism (more)

Kevin Carson champions Mutualism - I can't figure out whether he's Anarcho Capitalist, Libertarian Socialist, or something else... (more)

The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever. For decades, activists on the right have pushed to steer state money toward alternatives to the public school system. (more)

those darn little plastic bricks (more)

the process of taking an industry or assets into government ownership by a national government or state.[1] Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being transferred to the public sector to be operated by or owned by the state. The opposite of nationalization is usually privatization or de-nationalization, but may also be municipalization. (more)

the extreme version of outsourcing from government "employees" to private corporations

Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism[1] is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism.[2]:7[3] Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade[4] (globalization) and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[12] These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism (more)

Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox[1][2][3][4][5][6] macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly, and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires.[7][8] MMT is an alternative to mainstream macroeconomic theory. It has been criticized by well known economists but is claimed by its proponents to be more effective in describing the global economy in the years following the Great Recession of 2007–2009 (Credit Crisis 2008). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory (more)

Ben Hunt on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the National Debt. This is the power of theory in the service of political expediency, the power of post hoc rationalizations gussied up as “theory”. (more)

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes[3] CB, FBA (/keɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles.[4] One of the most influential economists of the 20th century,[5][6][7] he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.[8] His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics. He is known as the "father of macroeconomics".[9] During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and since wages and labour costs are rigid downwards the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment.[10] Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies (fiscal policy, monetary policy) to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. After the 1929 crisis, Keynes also turned away from a fundamental pillar of neoclassical economics: free trade. He criticized Ricardian comparative advantage theory (the foundation of free trade), considering the theory's initial assumptions unrealistic, and became definitively protectionist.[11][12][13] He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in early 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes (more)

Climate Change SciFi by Kim Stanley Robinson: ISBN:978-0316300131 (more)

variations of Capitalism that are "net-negative" to humanity. Some think that's all of them (no-true-scotsman), but I think I (liberaltarian) still disagree.... (more)