from Peter Radford Who is Neil Lawrence? Why do I ask? The Financial Tims published a letter he wrote in which he directs us to the real value in artificial intelligence. It will not be sourced through some centrally orchestrated “grand plan” that investors in various AI businesses can more readily put a value on. […]
from Lars Syll Economics today has — as we all know — become a ‘the model is the message’ discipline. However, as long as it does not seriously examine and evaluate the compatibility between the models and their real‑world target systems, the belief that these models significantly improve our ability to understand or explain what […]
from Lars Syll The purported strength of New Classical macroeconomics is that it has firm anchorage in preference-based microeconomics, and especially the decisions taken by inter-temporal utility maximising ‘forward-looking’ individuals. To some of us, however, this has come at too high a price. The almost quasi-religious insistence that macroeconomics has to have microfoundations — without […]
from Dean Baker Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI. It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. […]
from Dean Baker I have written before on the AI bubble. The stock valuations we are seeing now look a lot like the valuations we saw before the Internet bubble began to crash in 2000. Even a quarter century later, people miss much of the story of that bubble. It’s true we had companies that never made […]
from Lars Syll The recurring pattern in financial crises is broadly the same. For one reason or another, a shift occurs in the economic cycle — such as war, innovation, or new regulation — which alters profit opportunities for banks and firms. Demand and prices rise, drawing ever larger parts of the economy into a […]
from Dean Baker The Economist gave us a classically sloppy piece last week, telling us that we need the mega-wealthy types like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The argument is largely tautological. It points out that the mega-rich have been responsible for the diffusion of important technologies. There is considerable truth to that, but this is because we […]
from Lars Syll For more than 20 years, economists were enthralled by so-called “rational expectations” models … That such models prevailed bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science … Good science recognises its limitations, but the prophets of rational expectations have usually shown no such modesty. Joseph Stiglitz The rational expectations hypothesis presupposes […]
