Apologies for yet more radio silence/forthcoming book
Rather like a duck crossing a pond, my activities over the last five months have been invisible above the surface, and furious below it. I have:
Written an 80,000-word book Rebuilding Economics from the Top Down, as required by for my sponsors at the Budapest Centre for Long-Term Sustainability (BC4LS);
Written two 4,000-word short papers, also for BC4LS;
Developed a new set of online lectures (given every Wednesday at 12pm New York time);
Continued working with Russell Standish to develop Ravel, a Business Intelligence platform built on top of our Open Source system dynamics program Minsky; and
Continued trying to raise awareness about how Neoclassical economists have misled themselves and the world about the dangers of Global Warming.
I finish my contract at BC4LS in three weeks, after which I'll return to more regular posting.
In the meantime, I am checking with BC4LS as to whether I can release the manuscript of my new book to my supporters here. If they agree, it will be available only to financial supporters. Though I've made a habit of making all my posts open access, I can't jeopardise the potential sales of this book for the publisher, so it will be restricted to supporters who are likely to buy the print version when it is available as well.
As a prelude, here is the table of contents for the new book. The chapters shown in bold involve new research that I did while at BC4LS.
Acknowledgements. 4
1 The Magnificent Failure of Mainstream Economics. 6
2 Soul-searching by a soulless discipline. 10
3 The Impossibility of Microfoundations for Macroeconomics. 16
3.1 Complexity. 16
3.2 The impossibility of constructionism with complex systems. 20
4 The “Anything Goes” Market Demand Curve. 22
5 Profit Maximization in the Real World. 28
5.1 Appendix: Real World Profit Maximization and Real World Microeconomics. 35
6 I’m not Discreet, and Neither is Time. 37
6.1 Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Difference Equations. 37
6.2 A Simple Approach to Dynamics Using Ratios. 42
7 The Macrofoundations of Macroeconomics. 44
7.1 Inherent Complexity and Cyclicality. 44
7.2 Debt-Deflation in a Pure Credit Economy. 48
7.3 Stabilising an Unstable Economy. 55
7.4 Conclusion. 57
7.5 Appendix: Deriving Goodwin’s model from macroeconomic definitions. 58
7.6 Appendix: The “Phillips Curve”. 63
7.7 Appendix: Deriving Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis from Definitions. 65
7.8 Appendix: Adding a Government Sector. 67
7.9 Appendix: Generalized Exponential and Logistic Functions. 69
8 What About Prices?. 70
8.1 A Kaleckian Pricing Equation. 72
8.2 A Monetary Model with Prices. 76
8.3 Appendix: Deriving the Price-Based Model 80
9 The System Dynamics Route to Modelling Economic Complexity. 81
9.1 For More Information: The Minsky Manual 86
10 Why Credit Money Matters. 88
10.1 Of Assets, Liabilities, and Equity. 90
10.2 Proving that money matters macroeconomically. 95
10.3 The Empirical Record. 97
11 It’s a Mixed Credit-Fiat World. 99
11.1 The Fundamentals of Fiat Money Creation. 99
11.2 Government Bond Sales. 106
11.3 Government Surpluses and the Roaring Twenties. 110
11.4 Government Surpluses and the Great Depression. 112
11.5 Modelling Coolidge’s Folly. 115
11.6 Isn’t this just MMT?. 118
12 Your Margin and Your Life. 120
12.1 A Credit-based theory of Asset Prices. 124
12.2 Ergodicity Economics. 127
12.3 Investment under uncertainty. 128
12.4 Conclusion. 129
13 The Role of Energy in Production. 130
13.1 A Production function without Energy. 135
13.2 Rescued by Solow’s Residual 136
13.3 The Power(lessness) of Energy?. 137
13.4 From Empirical Regularity to the Role of Energy in Production. 142
13.5 Conclusion. 145
13.6 Appendix: Data Tables. 145
14 Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies. 149
14.1 “Simplifying Assumptions”, Milton Friedman, and the “F-twist”. 150
14.2 Domain Assumptions, Paradigms, and Scientific Revolutions. 152
15 Neoclassical economics and the demise of capitalism.. 158
15.1 Confusing the Weather with the Climate. 161
15.2 Confusing Space with Time. 164
15.3 Surveying mainly economists about Global Warming. 166
15.4 A Summing Up in 2009. 168
15.5 Assuming No Change to the Climate from Global Warming. 168
15.6 Reducing Tipping Points to Degrees. 169
15.7 Assuming Constant Acceleration in Economic Damages. 171
15.8 Modelling Weather without Precipitation. 175
15.9 The Shell and Pea Trick of “Damages to Future GDP”. 176
15.10 “The Climate is Always Changing”. 179
15.11 Conclusion. 181
16 Conclusion: Future Economics and a Future Economy?. 183
16.1 No Room for Pluralism.. 183
16.2 Will Civilisation Survive Neoclassical Economics?. 187
17 Postscript: Critical Comments on Werner’s How to Achieve Long-Term Sustainability 189