The commonly adopted definitions of risk and uncertainty generate conceptual problems and inconsistencies, and they are a source of confusion in general. However, alternative and proper definitions are: (1) First there is the distinction between certainty and uncertainty. (2) Uncertainty forks...

W3C is about to release MathML 2.0. This should have been a joyous occasion, but it appears to be a horror. They created a horrible way to do mathematics on the internet. It is Byzantinely complex, unintuitive, unesthetic, highly undocumented, it requires complex software support, etcetera. A...

Jan Tinbergen helped creating the Dutch Central Planning Bureau after 1945, and Dutch society has benefitted enormously up to this very day in 2004. The Dutch situation has also been an example to the world. But there is a down side when the CPB adopts a wrong theory and when policy becomes...

The world has 6 billion people, and rising, and we like them all to know a little bit of economics. This means that there is a huge market for economic theory, economics textbooks and teachers. As groups of economists have the objective to get a little bit of the action, a key strategy seems to...

Rational agents would opt for world government, properly defined. Without world government, dealings between sovereign states are not only affected by the military and economic power of those states and by the international bodies that they agree upon to wield and control their power, like the...

An important aspect for economics and its methodology is the relation between its definitions and the reality that those definitions (should) reflect. Creative minds coin definitions that maximize explanatory power. An example that highlights this phenomenon can be found in physics and notably...

This paper explores the links between matching, ranking, rating, Elo- rating, logit modeling, Rasch modeling, Item-Response Theory (IRT), voting, aggregation, and the like. These issues arise e.g. when testing students, or rating web pages or scientific papers. The analysis is at a very basic...

Proper monetary accounting rules are: (1) Central Banks should conform to the practice of the US Federal Reserve to distinguish its Balance Sheet from its Statement of Conditions. (2) Fiat money should not appear as a liability in a Balance Sheet. (3) The Central Bank should not record more...

This paper gives the announcement that the 2nd edition of DRGTPE is available at Dutch University Press. The basic idea of the book is that Keynes's General Theory is generalised even further by including endogenous government in the model, so that we arrive at a truly general Political Economy....

When cleaning up my archives I came across a short article of April 1991 co-authored with Jan Tinbergen, on what the Soviet Union might learn from OECD countries in economics and politics. The article apparently never got published, partly since the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. Jan...