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…
Category: State of economics
Modern Political Economics: Chapter 2
I am currently reading “Modern Political Economy: Making sense of the post-2008 world” by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, published in 2011 by Routledge. In this and next posts I will collect my comments, chapter by chapter. Here I discuss Chapter 2. This chapter reiterates the book’s main theme that economics is tainted…
Modern Political Economics: Introduction
I am currently reading “Modern Political Economy: Making sense of the post-2008 world” by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, published in 2011 by Routledge. In this and next posts I will collect my comments, chapter by chapter. These notes also form the foundation for a reading club initiated at Queen’s University Management School…
Stiglitz in Glasgow
I just returned from the meetings of the European Economic Association (EEA) in Glasgow. It was a good opportunity to assess the state of economics (as a science) after the collapse of the global financial system in 2008. As remarked by Phil Mirowski in a recent article, the state of economics is not very good…
Limitations of behavioral economics
Over the past months during the current economic recession and financial crisis, there has developed a published opinion as if so-called behavioral economics could explain the crisis. Behavioral economics emanates from observations in economic and game theoretic experiments that human subjects do not behave rationally, but are clearly bounded in their reasoning about decisions. Subjects…