En orsakt till bankernas läge är framgångsrik lobbyism, vilket syns särskilt tydligt i betalningsutredningen som just nu behandlas av regeringen.
Utredningens huvudfråga var: Ska staten ge ut kontanter och digitala e-kronor – eller ska svenska kronan bli utkonkurrerad av privata alternativ? När vi går igenom utredningen ser vi att den oförblommerat tar bankernas parti …
När Riksbanken lanserade idén om en e-krona protesterade bankerna att det var ”ett riskfyllt socialt experiment”, vilket mynnade ut i att Riksbanken inte fick gå vidare utan en statlig utredning. Men utredningen dröjde, trots flera påminnelser från Riksbanken om att ”vi behöver hjälp” och att det är av ”yttersta vikt” att frågan “utreds både noggrant och skyndsamt”. Sju år efter projektets start kom utredningen på 1317 sidor med slutsatsen: Riksbanken får utreda saken nästa år. Från att ha legat i framkant med e-kronan halkar Sverige efter och blir omkört av ECB och andra länder. Hur kunde det ske?
Utredningen skriver: “Det har diskuterats varför amerikanska myndigheter påbörjat arbetet med CBDC (digitala centralbankspengar) senare än andra större ekonomier. En anledning kan vara att bankerna har en stark ställning och ett stort politiskt inflytande”. Med facit i hand kan vi konstatera att även svenska banker varit mycket framgångsrika med sin lobbyism. Detta hämmar inte bara sund konkurrens, innovation och utveckling, det undergräver förtroendet för vårt demokratiska system.
Samuel Färdow Kazen, Lars P Syll, Louisa Wickström, Björn Eriksson
Klassresan
31 Dec, 2023 at 18:03 | Posted in Varia | 1 Comment
Genom att utbilda mig skulle jag få ett bättre jobb än pappa, tjäna mer pengar än vad han giorde och slippa slita ut min kropp medan jag gorde det. Helt enkelt kunna leva ett godare liv än vad han hade gjort. l en rent objektiv och materiell mening har jag också lyckats bättre med det än nästan alla andra som har gjort samma resa. En arbetargrabb som steg på tåget så fort han tagit studenten vilket bara en av tjugo med samma bakgrund som jag gjorde vid den här tiden.
Hur jag passerar station efter station i riktning mot det resmål där jag ska kliva av och leva hela mitt liv som en lycklig människa … Problemet var att jag inte kunde resa ifrån mig själv och lämna den jag egentligen var bakom mig … Väl framme efter avslutad resa steg jag av på ett ställe där jag aldrig har känt mig hemma eftersom det var avsett for andra än såna som jag.
Holiday Math Activities
30 Dec, 2023 at 12:38 | Posted in Varia | 2 CommentsLong holidays are nice. But sometimes, amid all the relaxation, you can feel your brain getting a bit mushy. What do you do then? Personally, I usually solve crosswords, chess problems, and the occasional mathematical puzzle to keep the grey brain cells active over Christmas and New Year…
Minnenas sorl
30 Dec, 2023 at 12:14 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Minnenas sorl.
Hansson de Wolfe United — poesi och musik i vacker förening.
Top 20 Economics Blogs 2023
27 Dec, 2023 at 21:14 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Top 20 Economics Blogs 2023
Economics bloggers contribute varied content, making it an accessible way to stay informed without delving into the density of academic journals. Below, we’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of blogs that we at INOMICS frequently turn to for engaging and informative articles covering a broad range of economic topics …
7. Naked Capitalism
Naked Capitalism, launched in 2006, features contributions from various authors with credentials in economics. Originating as a response to perceived underreporting of risk in credit instruments, the blog critically analyses policies since the 1970s, attributing them to events like the 2008 Financial Crisis. Naked Capitalism aims to challenge the status quo that, in its view, contributed to a recession impacting ordinary workers, making it essential reading for understanding the Financial Crisis and its aftermath.
9. New Economic Perspectives
Featuring contributions from various highly qualified economists, legal scholars, and financial market practitioners, New Economic Perspectives analyses global economics. Originating after the 2008 Financial Crisis, the blog seeks to provide an accurate understanding of the crisis’s causes and offers fresh ideas on addressing ongoing economic weaknesses.
16. The Undercover Economist
Tim Harford, a Financial Times columnist, is the author of “The Undercover Economist,” a blog that delves into the economic ideas behind everyday experiences.
20. Lars P. Syll
Lars Pålsson Syll, a professor at Malmö University in Sweden, maintains a blog that combines personal posts and professional insights. Covering the philosophy and methodology of economics, theories of distributive justice, and critical realist social science, Syll is a vocal critic of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism. The blog is multilingual, featuring posts in English, French, German, and Swedish.
Decision making — trustworthiness vs relevance
27 Dec, 2023 at 17:27 | Posted in Statistics & Econometrics | Comments Off on Decision making — trustworthiness vs relevanceThe random assignment plus masking are supposed to make it likely that the two groups have the same distribution of causal factors. It is controversial how confident these measures should make us that they do this. This issue bears on the trustworthiness of causal claims backed by RCTs. As we noted, trustworthiness is the central topic of many other guides. But we aim to move beyond that; we concentrate on relevance …
Randomization is often defended by the claim that it is the only way to deal with unknown causal factors. If so, then an ideal RCT can be the superior choice if you are not very secure that you know much about what the significant causal factors are. Supposing that you are in this situation, then ranking good RCT studies above otherwise good studies that do not mask and randomize seems correct — so long as it is remembered as well that what is at stake is trustworthiness, not relevance or cost effectiveness or moral acceptability …
We have dealt here with effectiveness, but we do not say that effectiveness is all you have to consider. We are not introducing yet another apparently comprehensive technique for cutting through the complexities of decision making. We have looked at no more than one, important, corner of the decision-making process, where we think that contemporary emphasis on trustworthiness over relevance has led us astray, and we hope to have shown how you can set about seeing what evidence you will need if you are to choose effective policies. Whatever else may be needed, that must be worth having.
Yours truly’s view is that nowadays many social scientists maintain that ‘imaginative empirical methods’ — such as natural experiments, field experiments, lab experiments, and RCTs — can help us answer questions concerning the external validity of models used in social sciences. In their view, they are more or less tests of ‘an underlying model’ that enable them to make the right selection from the ever-expanding ‘collection of potentially applicable models.’ When looked at carefully, however, there are not many convincing reasons to share this optimism.
Many ‘experimentalists’ claim that it is easy to replicate experiments under different conditions and therefore a fortiori easy to test the robustness of experimental results. But is it really that easy? Population selection is rarely simple. Most social scientists — including economists — that use natural experiments, do as a rule not work with random samples taken from well-defined populations. Had the problem of external validity only been about inference from sample to population, this would be no critical problem. But the really interesting inferences are those we try to make from specific labs/experiments/fields to specific real-world situations/institutions/ structures that we are interested in understanding or (causally) explaining. And then the population problem is more difficult to tackle.
Achieving ‘as-if’ randomization settings is not enough. At the end of the day, what counts when we evaluate natural experiments is substantive and policy relevance — as in John Snow’s path-breaking ‘shoe-leather’ cholera study in 1855 — and not if we come up with more and more contrived instrumental-variables designs or not.
‘Ideally controlled experiments’ tell us with certainty what causes what effects — but only given the right ‘closures.’ Making appropriate extrapolations from (ideal, accidental, natural or quasi) experiments to different settings, populations or target systems is difficult. “It works there” is no evidence for “it will work here”. Causes deduced in an experimental setting still have to show that they come with an export warrant to the target population/system. The causal background assumptions made have to be justified, and without licenses to export, the value of ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ methods is rather small. The contemporary emphasis on ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘rigour’ over relevance certainly often leads us astray.
Da Doo Ron Ron
27 Dec, 2023 at 13:52 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Da Doo Ron Ron.
Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound masterpiece.
And that 1960s choreography! I just love it.
Soon the angels will land
22 Dec, 2023 at 19:21 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Soon the angels will land.
Forget devilry and malice
Forget everything I’ve done out of spite
I love you so deeply
…
Soon the angels will land
Soon the morning is ablaze
Do I dare say that we have each other
Do you dare lay your cheek in my hand
How to become a Keynesian
22 Dec, 2023 at 15:37 | Posted in Economics | 2 CommentsUntil [2008], when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics … I had heard that it was a very difficult book and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes’s earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised by, or inclined to challenge, the claim made in 1992 by Gregory Mankiw, a prominent macroeconomist at Harvard, that “after fifty years of additional progress in economic science, The General Theory is an outdated book. . . . We are in a much better position than Keynes was to figure out how the economy works.”
We have learned since [2008] that the present generation of economists has not figured out how the economy works …
Baffled by the profession’s disarray, I decided I had better read The General Theory. Having done so, I have concluded that, despite its antiquity, it is the best guide we have to the crisis …
It is an especially difficult read for present-day academic economists, because it is based on a conception of economics remote from theirs. This is what made the book seem “outdated” to Mankiw — and has made it, indeed, a largely unread classic … The dominant conception of economics today, and one that has guided my own academic work in the economics of law, is that economics is the study of rational choice … Keynes wanted to be realistic about decision-making rather than explore how far an economist could get by assuming that people really do base decisions on some approximation to cost-benefit analysis …
Economists may have forgotten The General Theory and moved on, but economics has not outgrown it, or the informal mode of argument that it exemplifies, which can illuminate nooks and crannies that are closed to mathematics. Keynes’s masterpiece is many things, but “outdated” it is not.
Mästarnas mästare har gått ur tiden
21 Dec, 2023 at 09:48 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Mästarnas mästare har gått ur tiden
En svensk fotbollslegendar har gått ur tiden.
Zlatan i all ära, men för mig kommer alltid den här grabben att vara nummer ett.
Bosse Larsson (1944-2023) spelade 16 säsonger i MFF. Han vann sex SM-guld och toppade skytteligan vid tre tillfällen. 1965 gjorde han 28 mål på 22 matcher.
Bosse var — precis som yours truly — uppvuxen på Rosendalsvägen på Backarna i Malmö.
Han sörjs av hela Malmö.
Evidence-based policy
20 Dec, 2023 at 17:35 | Posted in Statistics & Econometrics | Comments Off on Evidence-based policy‘Ideally controlled experiments’ tell us with certainty what causes what effects — but only given the right closures. Making appropriate extrapolations from (ideal, accidental, natural or quasi) experiments to different settings, populations or target systems, is not easy. ‘It works there’ is no evidence for ‘it will work here.’ Causes deduced in an experimental setting still have to show that they come with a transportability warrant to the target population. The causal background assumptions made have to be justified, and without licenses to transport, the value of ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ methods — and ‘on-average-knowledge’ — is often despairingly small.
Like us, you want evidence that a policy will work here, where you are. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) do not tell you that. They do not even tell you that a policy works. What they tell you is that a policy worked there, where the trial was carried out, in that population. Our argument is that the changes in tense – from “worked” to “work” – are not just a matter of grammatical detail. To move from one to the other requires hard intellectual and practical effort. The fact that it worked there is indeed fact. But for that fact to be evidence that it will work here, it needs to be relevant to that conclusion. To make RCTs relevant you need a lot more information and of a very different kind.
So, no, yours truly finds it hard to share the enthusiasm and optimism on the value of (quasi)natural experiments and all the statistical-econometric machinery that comes with it. Guess I’m still waiting for the transportability warrant …
Tendentiös statlig utredning tar storbankernas parti
20 Dec, 2023 at 13:43 | Posted in Politics & Society | 1 CommentHistoriska vingslag i Lund (personal)
19 Dec, 2023 at 16:03 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Historiska vingslag i Lund (personal)
Idag när jag hjälpte vår yngsta dotter att efter nio år i Malmö flytta tillbaka till Lund fann jag till min förvåning att huset hon skulle flytta in i på Stora Magle Kyrkogata var gamla Historiska Institutionen. Huset som jag besökte ett otal gånger i mitten på 70-talet när jag läste tre betyg i historia har tydligen blivit omgjort till bostadshus. Jag har bara trevliga minnen därifrån — inte minst uppskattade lärare som Lars-Arne Norborg och Lennart Sjöstedt — så det ska bli trevligt att få vistas i det gamla huset när vi besöker vår Linnea!
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