Conventional approaches, unconventional conclusions

“Conventional approaches, unconventional conclusions” on the global finance and economic issues of the day.  That’s the theme of this blog with the seemingly smug and sarcastic title of Rogue Economist Rants, wherein I blogged from May 2008 up to May 2012.

I chose economics as my specific area of conversation because of its relevance to current world problems. (More background here). And ever since I read Joseph Stiglitz’ Globalization and its Discontents, I have come to realize that what we sometimes know to be correct prescriptions to economic problems could actually be, if you think about it, making problems worse. His book convinced me that we really don’t know enough about economics for anyone to be a fool-proof prescriptive policy adviser. Each case is different, and requires a specific inquiry into its own circumstances.

And that is why I strove to see the unconventional in the conventional. I also strove to determine whether, even when using conventional approaches, if this can lead to unconventional conclusions.  And in economics, focusing on different sets of data, or analyzing events from different starting points, even when using the same approach, does lead to different conclusions.  Hopefully, my body of posts demonstrates this over-riding intent sufficiently to readers.  

The key take away of the posts I made in 2011-2012 can be summarized around the following basic tenets, as laid out in my sidebar since 2011:

3 QUESTIONS TEST OF WHETHER IT IS WORTH THE PUBLIC SPENDING

1. Does this create productive jobs for those who would be otherwise unemployed?
2. Will the newly hired workers have meaningful income that they can spend back in the economy?
3. Is the output of the jobs adding to capacity of goods/services demanded?

If it generates income for the unemployed, aggregate demand will go up. If it adds to demanded capacity, there will be no inflation. If the output is demanded by people, there will be no wastage.

I also have another minor blog in Tumblr, which I treated as a baby blog platform, and which I considered a good one-stop location for comments I made on sites outside of this main blog.  Very often, these comments were the germ of ideas that eventually formed into full blog posts over here. Also, it is worthwhile to mention, some full-blown posts were also developed from comment discussions that happened at Seeking Alpha, which syndicated some of my blog posts from here, as chosen by that site’s curators. 

I stopped blogging for the next ten years after 2012, because I did not want to just end up repeating myself on topics I've already covered. However, let's see if every now and then, a topic or raging issue of the day compels me to come back and cover it with a new blog post here. Meantime, I'm occassionally on twitter.