Author: Damian Merciar

You know what’s funny about school shootings?

It’s the only time the public still universally loves teachers.

We don’t trust them with collective bargaining rights. We don’t think they deserve a decent salary. Heck! We don’t even trust their judgement to design their own teaching standards, lead their own classrooms or be evaluated by their own principals!

But when armed assailants show up at school, then we think teachers are just great.

When angry teens arrive rifles strapped to their trench-coated backs, carrying duffel bags full of ammunition – then teachers are heroes.

I guess you can’t standardize your way past a bullet.

My school district had an outstanding training today. Administration brought in current and retired FBI agents, local law enforcement and EMTs to practice active shooter drills with the teachers.

We spent the morning learning about common factors between various school…

For quite a few months I have, on this blog, been alluding to a paper that I had written which showed that the natural rate of interest is implicitly dependent on the EMH in its strong-form in order to be coherent. I have finally published this paper (in working paper form) with the Levy Institute and it can be read here:

Endogenous Money and the Natural Rate of Interest: The Reemergence of Liquidity Preference and Animal Spirits in the Post-Keynesian Theory of Capital Markets

Some notes on the paper.

The motivation for the paper was that when reading up on endogenous money during my degree I found that mainstream economists had largely integrated it in their more recent models. This integration, as the paper notes, usually took the form of a Taylor Rule. I should be clear that although this had become standard practice at some levels of the discipline…

The other day I did a post on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) that generated some discussion. I want to deal with a few of the issues raised in a some upcoming blogposts.

One issue of interest was that many EMH proponents said: “Sure, Warren Buffett and Keynes beat the market over a long-period we’re not saying that. Some people might beat the market out of pure luck.” Well that seems like rubbish to me.

Think about this. If the EMH says that no one single person can beat the market over the long-run that is a testable proposition. But if they then say that some people might but this is “by luck” that is not testable. That is, in fact, based on an a priori assumption that anyone who beats the market did not do so by skill.

Now, personally I think that some people beat the market by…