Epistemology
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Archaeology, the Internet and Neutrinos
Or: Space and the Universe are a Palimpsest . Most recently Israeli archaeologists unearthed a crusader’s inscription believed to be around 800 years old and, which is why it makes headlines, written in Arabic. For those who have followed archaelogical progress over several decades (and reconstructed it from the very beginnings of “modern” archaeology starting…
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Economic Fallacy VII: The Net Economic Gain through Pharmaceuticals
Are double-blind studies of pharmaceuticals enough to prove the efficiency of a new drug? You may be surprised to hear that potentially 90% of such studies could be flawed.
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Economic Musings VI: Modern Economies – Dying of Consumption
There is a great debate in the history of economics whether there can be under-consumption in any real historic moment of the state of an economy and if so, whether it has detrimental effects and if so, what is to be done about it. And modern economists seem to have found a magic wand with…
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Economic Fallacy VI: The Divisive Multiplier
There is a widespread believe that if governments inject a certain amount of money into “an” or “their” economy, it will miraculously multiply and bear fruit beyond what was invested. This is one of the mainstays of Keynesian economics in that it justifies state subsidies, public works, in short just any intervention by a state…
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Economic Fallacy V: Can CPI measure Deflation?
In a recent post Woodford warns of deflation threat as CPI drops to 3% CrisisMaven found another instance of the widespread belief that not only sinking prices (misspelt “deflation”) are harmful as they cause buyers “to strike” but that the housing market has “deflated”.
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Economic Fallacy IV: Buyers’ Strike during Deflation?
If buyers don’t buy during a period of deflation why would sellers sell during periods of inflation?
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Economic Musings IV: How Bank Robbers cause Inflation
If a robber robs a bank and runs away with the money, never gets caught or if he gets caught has spent the money before that, has that caused inflation? No – the bank now has less money and thus its money holdings have decreased exactly as much as the robber’s holdings increased. But what…
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Economic Musings III: The Bubble Analogy
There’s this fear that if a financial bubble bursts this would be tantamount to deflation (after all, when an inflatable dinghy bursts it’s called deflation). And because deflation is deemed to be a bad thing the panacea must be (re)inflation of “the” economy. Well, let’s look at what happens when a balloon bursts …
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Economic Fallacy II: Speculation is Harmful?
Apart from outright naval blockade or sieges there has probably been hardly another operation considered as deadly and therefore been at times revenged than what is deemed “profiteering” speculation. The idea to many is that speculation robs honest people of their livelihood. Alleged speculators have been tortured, hanged, disenfranchised, robbed, denigrated, banned, imprisoned, scandalised and…
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How GDP betrays the Economy
Isn’t the crisis over, albeit the recovery may be slow? Hasn’t GDP contraction slowed down, been stopped, maybe reversed? Isn’t all that good news? Couldn’t it have been worse if the Fed hadn’t done the right things? The problem with almost all macro-economic aggregates ist that
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What’s wrong with Economics?
This article is a prerequisite to understanding many of the arguments put forth on this blog in the future and therefore probably one of the most important if not the most important one. It is, as many of CrisisMaven’s posts, rather lengthy, however, compared to so many trillions lost in paper money, what are a…