Category Archives: William K. Black

Revealed Biases: Why MMT Critics Continue to Rely on Strawman Arguments

Posted on July 6, 2013 by | 39 comments

By William K. Black

Economists of nearly every flavor believe in the concept of “revealed preferences.”  What matters is not what people say they will do in a hypothetical situation, but what they actually do.  Their actions speak more credibly than their words.  In this column I announce a related concept: “revealed biases.”

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Justice Scalia’s Despairing Effort to Disguise DOMA’s “Badge of Inferiority” of Gays

Posted on June 27, 2013 by | 14 comments

By William K. Black

Introduction

Justice Scalia yearns the days when gays could be imprisoned for consensual, adult sex.  His rage at the changes in the Nation and the Supreme Court on equality for same sex relationships and his impotence to stop those changes is palpable.  Fortunately, while he demands that his colleagues be “anodyne” in their pronouncements and cease demonizing their critics he is immune to self-awareness and irony.  As a result, we can count on him to display rudeness and condescension in heaping portions in oral argument and his opinions.  His dissent in Windsor (which declared the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) dealing with federal recognition of lawful same sex marriages unconstitutional) is a derisive critique of the Court’s opinion.  In this column I discuss his efforts to disguise DOMA’s “badge of inferiority” for gays and lawful same sex marriages.  I explain the landmines he sought to avoid triggering on this point. Continue reading →

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The Game Theoretical CEO: An Inexplicable Lawful Agent

Posted on June 24, 2013 by | 1 comment

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

Introduction

This is the sixth (and final) of my series of articles on the work of Roger Myerson, a 2007 Laureate in Economics.  Myerson’s work on CEOs is typical of the game theoretical approach to explaining the behavior of CEOs and firms, so I am discussing an exemplar rather than an outlier.  This installment discusses some of the fatal flaws that I argue characterize the game theoretical work on CEOs by the Laureates.  I will urge that they are weakest where they believe they are strongest – their models.  The article explains why the models are specified incorrectly because the models have no coherent theory (or understanding) of fraud or ethics.  The game theoretical Laureates (Laureates) make unsupportable implicit assumptions that are belied by the data and internally inconsistent with their explicit assumptions.

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The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular”

Posted on June 23, 2013 by | 7 comments

By William K. Black

Heritage Foundation is run by Jim DeMint, the former Tea Party legislator.  Heritage promptly demonstrated the impact of its new leadership with its purported study of the benefits and costs of immigration that ignored the benefits and inflated the costs.  Even other conservative groups were appalled – and that was before one of the co-authors of its studies’ past writings on the inferiority of certain minorities that purportedly made assimilation fail became public.  Heritage is one of many anti-think tanks where anyone with a progressive thought is shown the door.

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William Black Appears on Alpha and Omega

Posted on June 23, 2013 by | 1 comment

NEP’s William Black appeared on the June 22, 2013 episode of Alpha and Omega. The topic of discussion is about a series of articles he has written over the last year on the economic achievements and political shenanigans of Rafael Correa, the President of Ecuador.

You can visit the site here.

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Confessions of a Confused but Privileged Right Wing, Liberal, Libertarian

Posted on June 20, 2013 by | 11 comments

By William K. Black

I was doing an unrelated search when I stumbled across a series of articles by “Citizen K” discussing me.  K explained the purpose of K’s January 26, 2013 column as:  “debunk[ing] Black’s self-promotion and right wing political idea that in the virtuous past justice prevailed.”  When pressed on this by a commenter, K explained:

“Yes it’s right wing to push the Bush admin as an exemplar of moral values. Libertarian fairy tales about how Capitalism used to be so moral in the good old days are right wing.

[Name deleted by me to protect his privacy] is not in the same ballpark as Black. He’s a very smart guy and pretty illuminating.”

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Myerson’s Ode to Crony Capitalism

Posted on June 18, 2013 by | 7 comments

By William K. Black

This is the fifth installment in my series of article about the predictive and policy failures of Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate in economics in 2007.  My first two articles critiqued his claim that capitalism’s unique advantage over communism is plutocracy because only exceptionally wealthy CEOs can be successfully bribed by their shareholders to “imitate” “good” CEOs who will not cheat the shareholders.

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Myerson’s misses the Miasma that is Modern Executive Compensation

Posted on June 17, 2013 by | 5 comments

By William K. Black

This is the fourth installment of my exploration of the work of Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate in economics in 2007.  It is part of what will be a broader series of articles exploring why economics is unique among the sciences in awarding the Prize to scholars whose predictive work proves profoundly wrong and leads to public policies that cause great harm.  The first installment used Myerson’s Prize lecture to explore his paean to plutocracy as the purported unique advantage of capitalism.

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NEP’s Bill Black Appears on Tell Somebody

Posted on June 17, 2013 by | Comments Off on NEP’s Bill Black Appears on Tell Somebody

Bill Black appeared on the June 11, 2013 pledge drive edition of Tell Somebody. The topics of discussion were economics and regulation. You can listen here.

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Myerson’s newest model: “tax poor workers to subsidize rich bankers”

Posted on June 13, 2013 by | 10 comments

By William K. Black

Roger Myerson has recently updated an article on his purported mechanism for explaining why our supposedly efficient markets are producing growing crises.

A MODEL OF MORAL-HAZARD CREDIT CYCLES (March 2010, revised September 2012) 

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