Monday, August 27, 2012

First day of class! And the rest of the fall (I am pretending that you care...)

And I'm looking forward to it. It's Macro Political Economy today, so a lot of political economy and post-Keynesianism. I have it with the same professor I had for history of economic thought last fall.

Before that I'm going to meet my sister downtown for lunch after her first morning of classes in Catholic University's master's in social work program. She's been working at SAIC for the last year and decided to go back to school for something she's really passionate about.

This fall will keep me busy - I've got a term paper in Gender Economics and in Econometrics instead of a final, which is great. The aim, of course, is to get them solid enough to eventually publish or include as a dissertation chapter. The plan right now is to write the gender one on the Family Medical Leave Act, and the econometrics one on the Georgia Job Creation Tax Credit (something I've been meaning to write up for a looong time now). Both empirical, although I have in mind a heavy theoretical motivation in the FMLA paper.

The rest of my time should be pretty well taken up too. We are wrapping up this engineering book (finally) with another conference at NBER. Our chapters are basically written. I need to write up the results of the petroleum engineer analysis, but that will just be a few pages in a larger chapter that's already drafted.

The Sloan Foundation work on early career scientists and engineers will keep trucking along. I'm sure we'll start to draft something for that this fall, but that's a three year project that is relatively open ended on products. I imagine most of the fall will just be working with the data.

Two things are going to be polished in the near future: an Urban Institute brief on joblessness among young black males, and my chapter in Guinevere Nell's book on the basic income guarantee. Both are written - I just need to incorporate review comments.

By the end of the semester I'll be getting more serious about two other things: finishing off the Critical Review article on Austrian business cycle theory, and an NSF grant proposal with my co-author on the engineering work (extra cash is always nice). The hope is to develop a new sort of synthetic panel dataset that will help with analyses of scientist and engineer job histories.

I guess that brings me to next semester, so I should probably end there!

Anyone else doing anything interesting this fall?

6 comments:

  1. Curious - your Macro Political Economy class HAS to cover Buchanan & Wagner if it's covering a bunch of post-keynesian stuff if it's at all pretending to be non-ideological, right?

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    1. I didn't see it on the syllabus, but I didn't look too closely. I don't think we do a whole lot of public finance. We did talk about Buchanan and Wagner in the regular macro class.

      It's pretty much a PK macro course, I think. I'll know more throughout the semester.

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    2. Checked - no Buchanan and Wagner. I much prefer B&T to B&W anyway. I haven't read all of B&W, but what I read didn't impress me much. In fact there's not much that Buchanan writes on Keynes that I've liked, although I've liked just about everything else. And I'd have to stop you if you want to cry ideology - I genuinely don't think it's very high quality work.

      However, it doesn't look like we are going to be talking about fiscal policy at all anyway, so perhaps that'll make you feel better.

      I browsed things a little more closely. The stuff that isn't PK that we're reading (which is most of it) is mainstream stuff, presumably to come in for some critique.

      I'm not worried about the class being ideological, although the professor certainly has his own sympathies.

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  2. Do you do Godley and SFC models in general? I wonder if they'd mention Keen.

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  3. Whatever you do Daniel Kuehn, just remember not to take any economic theory too seriously, and don't be afraid to question your teachers. Perhaps you ought to ask Robert Blecker whether he has heard of Dr. Michael Emmett Brady or any other scholar who has criticised the Post Keynesian version of Keynes's aggregate supply function, D-Z model, and aggregate supply curve/employment function. Dr. Michael Emmett Brady has other scholars who have made criticisms of the Post Keynesian versions of the D-Z model and aggregate supply curve/employment function, like Claudia Heller and Rogerio Arthmar. Perhaps you also ought to read the articles of Dr. Michael Emmett Brady regarding the mathematics of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) closer, and get a copy of The Theory of Unemployment (1933) by Arthur Cecil Pigou. When you get a copy of The Theory of Unemployment, read Part II of that book (especially Chapters 8 to 10) VERY CAREFULLY. After that, compare the mathematics of Pigou's 1933 book with the mathematics in Book V of The General Theory. Then you will be able to accurately derive Keynes's mathematical model in The General Theory.

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