Macroscopic

 I have become increasingly conscious that this blog contains scant macroeconomic analysis, perhaps making the subtitle misleading.  This piece therefore intends to summarise the findings from my recently submitted undergraduate thesis, but will hopefully still be accessible. I recently submitted my undergraduate dissertation, entitled: 'The UK Phillips Curve Since the Great Moderation: A Single-Equation Econometric Analysis'. The basic idea was to employ the widespread single-equation approach to the Phillips curve in analysing UK macroeconomic data during the Great Moderation, the Great Recession and thereafter. But why was this analysis necessary? First and foremost, as Simon Wren-Lewis has recently argued, the Phillips curve represents a fundamental economic intuition: when more people are in work, aggregate demand is stronger, meaning it is more likely to be profit-maximising for individual firms to raise prices, leading to inflation. A.W. Phillips, in his seminal 19...

Having first written about a 'post-truth' world a while back now, I have nevertheless been surprised in the following months that the term has become common currency so quickly, even finding its way into popular discourse. I want to argue here that the advent of 'post-truth' and the collapse of a deference toward expertise is an unintended consequence of Neoliberalism and its appeal to a particularly crude and ill-defended subjectivism, whose triumph led to the defeat of Social Democracy and a transformation of the political landscape. Evidence from Labour's performance in Britain after two general election defeats, and more worryingly Jeremy Corbyn being the first Labour leader to never  achieve positive poll ratings, appears to confirm that this is not something that is about to be reversed. Firstly, a word about subjectivism in this context. In moral philosophy, subjectivism is effectively the idea that there are no moral norms to which individuals have a duty ...