The 2007+ credit crunch and economic crisis put European governments in severe debt, with talk about a Greek partial default. It also put the European banks into a zombie condition, while under Basel III the capital requirement rises from 8% to 10.5% (which requirement does not cover public debt...

Basel III classifies government debt as risk free while actual interest rates in the European Union (EU) show large differences not only because of liquidity but mainly because of the risk of default, as also reflected in credit default swaps. Curiously such debt defaults may not happen so that...

Economic theory needs a stronger defence against unwise application of mathematics. Mathematicians are trained for abstract thought and not for empirical science. Their contribution can wreak havoc, for example in education with real life pupils and students, in finance by neglecting real world...

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in social choice finds different interpretations. Bordes-Tideman (1991) and Tideman (2006) suggest that collective rationality would be an illusion and that practical voting procedures do not tend to require completeness or transitivity. Colignatus (1990 and 2011)...

Democratic nations are advised to have parliaments select the chief executive by the Borda Fixed Point method. The current practice of having direct popular elections using systems that have originated in history is inoptimal and actually quite undemocratic since winners are selected who don’t...

Basic causality is that a cause is present or absent and that the effect follows with a success or not. This happy state of affairs becomes opaque when there is a third variable that can be present or absent and that might be a seeming cause. The 2 x 2 x 2 layout deserves the standard name of...

Tinbergen & Hueting (1991) provide an approach to the economics of ecological survival that still is unsurpassed. Various “green GDPs” have been proposed such as ISEW, Ecological Footprint, Genuine Savings and Genuine Progress Indicator, and lately there is an increased interest in happiness...

Roefie Hueting (1929), recently turned 78 years of age, has been working on the subject of economics and the environment since around 1965. Seminal results are his notion of environmental functions (WWF, 1969), his Ph.D. thesis “New Scarcity and Economic Growth. More welfare through less...

The steps in this paper are: (1) to recall the S = I relation and its position in macro-economics, (2) to observe how this equation is very relevant again with the renewed relunctance of banks to finance investments, (3) to point out that consumer durables are investments too, (4) to highlight...

Logistic regression (LR) is one of the most used estimation techniques for nominal data collected in contingency tables, and the question arises how the recently proposed concept of nominal correlation and regression (NCR) relates to it. (1) LR targets the cells in the contingency table while...