A sustained and increasingly technical argument about European economic performance has been running across economics blogs and Substacks since early 2026. The starting gun was fired by Seth Ackerman in a series of posts in February — “Eurpoors vs. Florida Man,” “Europe’s productivity keeps outpacing the US,” and “Productivity statistics, Paul Krugman, and Hicks’s shadows…
Category: Methodology of economics
Economic Mythology: What Money Is Not
A response to Paul Krugman’s column “The Dollar’s Special Status: Sources and Threats” April 2026 Paul Krugman’s recent column on the international role of the US dollar is an accomplished piece of applied economics. He marshals a great deal of evidence efficiently, his empirical command is not in question, and his conclusion — that dollar…
Commodities: I―What are they?
Recently the world was confronted with the phenomenon that oil had a negative price due to the tremendous drop in demand for oil due to the worldwide Corona crisis lockdown, as widely reported in the media. From an economist’s perspective this should be quite shocking and worrying, since traditional market theory does not really allow…
Thoughts inspired by Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, who recently published some interesting and rather inspirational books in the Dutch language. Several of these have been translated now. The two main books I am referring to are: Bregman (2017), Utopia for Realists: and how we can get there, Bloomsbury, translated by Elizabeth Manton, originally published as Gratis…
Surveying the literature on network formation under mutual consent
I just posted a survey on game-theoretic methods of understanding network formation under the hypothesis of mutual consent in link formation. The introduction of consent in link formation imposes a coordination problem in the network formation process. This survey explores the conclusions from this theory and the various methodologies to avoid the main pitfalls.The main…
Freedom in our contemporary global economy
What is freedom? It seems that this question has become very important in the age of neoliberal decline of civic society. Recently, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek discussed freedom in our age of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Zizek is as usual rather fuzzy about what exactly…