I shall leave the opening statement of this blog in the hands of Sir Keynes...
"The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher...No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard" [Keynes 1963,140-141].
May Keynes wisdom enlighten our paths and bless this blog and its partcipants :)
8 comments:
We should have a permanent link to the post autistic economic review.
http://www.paecon.net/
"The real world is complex, as we well know. And researchers distinguish themselves not by confirming conventional wisdom, but by questioning it.
Policy-makers, by contrast, require that the world by very simple… Neither the politician nor the bureaucrat wishes to be told that the world is complex.
Hence, researchers as researchers should be wary of policy-making. They should analyze the world as they perceive it to be, untainted by how they would like it to be. They may of course take on a role as advisers, consultants, but they should recognize that they are then crossing aline- between analysis and action- and that this is likely to draw them into unwarranted generalization, unjustified simplification."
As SOAS economists, we should make our responsible passionate decision: There is only but one line to cross... which side do we want to go to?
A very interesting article and move by Correa... regardless of his economic reform agenda (which I haven't looked at it, and regardless with his ally with Chavez... which I am very critical of)... this article draws on an important subject: the conditionality of the Bank's loans and the interesting link with the concept of soverign states... and its evolution in the contemporary international order from the political economic perspective.
Ecuador threatens to expel World Bank
By Hal Weitzman
Boosted by a referendum on Sunday that overwhelmingly backed his reform agenda, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftwing president, has accused the World Bank of extortion and threatened to kick out the multilateral lender.
The remarks suggest Mr Correa views the referendum victory as an important battle with his domestic political opponents and has now shifted his focus to his antagonists in the international arena.
The president said he would be asking the Bank’s representative in Ecuador why the lender refused to disburse a $100m loan in 2005, when Mr Correa was finance minister. “If he doesn’t give explications that we consider satisfactory, we will expel the World Bank representative because we won’t accept any blackmail from anyone,” he said.
The president’s complaint is personal: as finance minister, he visited Washington in August 2005 to collect a $100m loan as part of the Bank’s fiscal support programme for Ecuador. However, Mr Correa was left embarrassingly empty-handed: the Bank suspended the loan in response to Ecuador’s restructuring of an oil stabilisation fund.
In an interview with the Financial Times at the time, Mr Correa said that by denying the loan at the last moment, the World Bank had broken a contract with the Andean country.
“This is an offence for Ecuador. A loan had been approved and was in place and they are cancelling it, completely outside any ethical or legal principle, because we changed a law,” he told the FT at the time. “We are a sovereign country. Nobody can punish us because we are changing our own laws.”
The squabble with the World Bank was a principal reason for Mr Correa being fired from the finance ministry. Casting himself as a defender of the Ecuadorean people against “neoliberal” international lenders, he used the publicity his sacking created to begin his campaign for the presidency.
On Sunday, Mr Correa won his second electoral victory in six months, by securing strong approval of his proposal for sweeping political reform: more than 78 per cent of voters supported his plan to set up an assembly to rewrite the constitution.
Speaking to the media following the referendum, Mr Correa – an ally of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader – also announced that his government had paid off all its debts to the International Monetary Fund, with a payment of $9m last week. He said the country had done so because “we don’t want to have anything to do with this international bureaucracy”.
At the same time, he suggested some continuity in economic policy, stressing his commitment to keep the US dollar as Ecuador’s national currency.
Mr Correa flew to the Venezuelan island of Margarita yesterday for an energy summit with other South American leaders.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Check it out:
http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/about.htm
http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/people.htm
http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/contributors.php
"The Voice of the Turtle is an online journal of left-wing politics and culture...."
Ben is (was) one of the contributors..."They f*uck you up those social cap", for example, can be found there.
I think it's dead though, guys...the last post seems to have been a couple of years ago. There is a variety of cool/weird/random/non random things there.
Interesting... seems like the Dead Poet's Society... Robin Williams starring as Ben Fine :).
I think Robin Williams would do an excellent Ben Fine!
I'm sure you've all seen/heard of the site already, but www.brettonwoodsproject.org is a great source for 'issues' related to our course. Not much theoretical content, more of a lay-person's guide to the ineffectiveness of IFIs. Good for recent examples to beef up our exam papers. Definitely worth subscribing to their bi-monthly 'Update', too.
“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
I think Ben Fine would like these 2 quotes, as he seemed really into quoting today in class.. The first one is just funny and the second I think he'd agree with disregarding the first lesson in economics for whatever reason..
As you can all see I'm doing a lot of studying!!!
Oh and I really liked this too!!
“The only truly new ideas [the right] has come up with in the last twenty years are (1) supply side economics, which is a way of redistributing the wealth upward toward those who already have more than they know what to do with, and (2) creationism, which is a parallel idea for redistributing ignorance out from its fundamentalist strongholds to those who know more than they need to.”
I could do this all night!!! Stop me!!
Cheers Joao for giving our little SOAS community a virtual house to meet once a while, after everybody will have left London and is spread out all over the world... But, well I hope that before we fully rely on this red pill, we will find some nights to chat with just red wine.
HASTA LA REVOLUCION
Post a Comment