Keynes, Knight, and Fundamental Uncertainty: A Double Centenary 1921–2021

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Robert W. Dimand
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Uncertainty

"Investor Myopia" in Post Keynesian Theory and in the Russian Economy

2006 ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Rozmainsky
Keyword(s):  
Endogenous Growth ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Transitional Economy ◽  
Transition Economics ◽  
Keynesian Economics ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Negative Growth

The article examines the issues concerning links between institutional economics, Post Keynesian economics, models of endogenous growth and transition economics. The author considers interrelations between ineffective institutional environment, too high degree of fundamental uncertainty, investor myopia and resulting decrease in investment and "negative" growth in Russia’s transitional economy.

Accuracy and Usefulness of Psychrometer and Pressure Chamber for Evaluating Water Potentials of Pinus radiata Needles

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 499 ◽  
Author(s):  
BD Millar
Keyword(s):  
Water Potential ◽  
Pinus Radiata ◽  
Xylem Sap ◽  
Pressure Chamber ◽  
Pressure Potential ◽  
Pine Trees ◽  
Average Water ◽  
Potential Gradients ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
The One

Pressure chamber evaluations of xylem sap pressure potential (P) and thermocouple psychrometric evaluations of average water potential (Ψl) in needles from both transpiring and non-transpiring pine trees (Pinus radiata D. Don) were compared in order to determine the relative accuracy and usefulness of these methods for assessing Ψl. Markedly different but linear P v. Ψl relationships were obtained for pine needles of different age and also for the case where resin exudation masked the xylem and led to a 'resin error'. Evidence suggests that these differences are mainly due to injection and resin errors in pressure chamber determinations totalling as much as 1 MPa (a 10 bar). The psychrometric method appears to be the much more accurate. Radial water potential gradients across leaves did not result in differences between evaluations of P and Ψl, at least in P. radiata. The need for multiple 'calibrations' of the pressure chamber and the fundamental uncertainty about the constancy of such calibrations on the one hand and the slowness of the excised-needle psychrometer on the other can restrict the usefulness of these methods.

scholarly journals Janus Face of Inflation Targeting_Walter_PrePrint

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Walter
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Inflation Targeting ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Central Banks ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Prototype Development ◽  
The Us ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Overall Effectiveness

In the 1980s, central banks around the world stumbled upon a new method for conducting theirmonetary policy: instead of the heavy-handed, „hydraulic“ manipulation of monetary aggregates,they learned to „govern the future“ by managing the expectations of market actors directly.New and better indicators and forecasts would provide the basis for a new communicativecoordination of markets expectations, permitting a more fine-grained and effective implementationof monetary policy, particular in controlling inflation.Focusing on the US Federal Reserve’s prototype development of inflation-targeting, this paper putsthis storyline to the test. Against the recent trend in sociology to conceive of expectations andfuturity as modes of coordination that thrive under conditions of (fundamental) uncertainty that defyrational calculation, I argue that futurity and the formation expectations inextricably depend onprior processes of formalization.Examining the transition to modern ‘inflation targeting’ monetary policy, I show how theeffectiveness of coordination by expectation is achieved by extensive processes of proceduralizationand standardization. While increasing the technical efficiency of fine-tuning expectations, thesegains are only possible because of the procedural narrowing of the scope of communicativeinteraction, which may significantly affect the overall effectiveness of this mode of coordination.I conclude with a call to more closely examine how formal and informal modes of coordination aremutually interdependent – and how the nature of their entanglements affects their effectiveness.

scholarly journals Too Much Technology and Too Little Regulation? The Spectacular Demise of P2P Lending in China

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ding Chen ◽  
Simon Deakin ◽  
Andrew Johnston ◽  
Boya Wang
Keyword(s):  
Banking Sector ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Internal Controls ◽  
Banking Activity ◽  
P2p Lending ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
The Government ◽  
Specific Regulation

Abstract In this paper we trace the rapid growth and spectacular demise of online peer to peer lending in China. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted in China in 2017 and 2018, we follow the expansion of the sector from the establishment of the first major platform in 2007, through the introduction of limited regulation in 2015 in response to a series of platform failures to the final de facto closure of the whole sector by the regulator in 2019–20. However, contrary to claims that technology would reduce risk, the new platforms appear to have given rise to new risks by connecting dispersed borrowers and lenders whilst the regulator had decided to leave the sector to evolve without specific regulation. While there were hopes that P2P lending might increase flows of finance to the SMEs that are excluded from the formal banking system, ultimately too much of the activity on the P2P platforms was characterised by what we term ‘transactional ambiguity’ and ‘legal fluidity’: it occurred on the fringes of legality, often amounting to Ponzi schemes, fraud or unlicensed banking activity. In contrast to the banking sector, where their intermediation role ensures that banks are the focal point in the event of borrower default, and conventional moneylending, where moneylenders bear the risk of default, defaults and platform failures in the P2P sector distributed losses far and wide around the country, often to lenders who were not capable of bearing them. Whilst the central government did not formally stand behind the P2P sector (as it does with banks because of the systemic implications of their operations), the government could not help but become involved where P2P lending transmitted losses to lenders who were dispersed around the whole country. Ultimately, central government announced a wholesale reversal of policy that led to the sector effectively being closed down. The episode cautions against overly optimistic claims that technology can eradicate the risks of fraud and fundamental uncertainty inherent in lending, and reminds us that, without appropriate regulation and adequate internal controls, financial institutions will always operate in ways that result in instability.

scholarly journals Animal spirits: Keynes' theory of rational investment decision-making under conditions of fundamental uncertainty

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Ognjen Radonjic
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Investment Decision ◽  
The Other ◽  
Investment Activity ◽  
Animal Spirits ◽  
Investment Decision Making ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Rational Investment

Keynes's term, animal spirits, has been mistakenly confused with irrational decision-making. However, if we accept Keynes' assumption that future is fundamentally uncertain and nonergodic, animal spirits become key factor that makes continual process of investment decision-making possible. On the other hand, if animal spirits blunt, investment activity dwindles and makes emergence of deep economic crisis likely.

scholarly journals Keynes on Expectations, Uncertainty and Defensive Behavior

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Defensive Behavior ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Precautionary Savings ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Mechanistic Approach ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Conventional Behavior

Keynesianism dominated macroeconomics until the early 1970s in the form of what was called hydraulic Keynesianism, a fundamentally mechanistic approach that assumed that economic agents always reacted in the same way to a certain set of stimuli. The dominance of hydraulic Keynesianism opened the way for the emerging criticism, first by Milton Friedman, and later by New Classical economists, that Keynesianism had no place for expectations. Keynes, however, dedicated close attention to the ways expectations were formed under fundamental uncertainty and how economic behavior was changed when agents acknowledged that the future was uncertain. For Keynes, acknowledging uncertainty meant that agents sought to take precautions against the possibility that their expectations were wrong and the decisions relying on them were incorrect. In The General Theory, Keynes showed that, in practically all fields, behavior would be significantly changed when agents acknowledged uncertainty. Precautionary savings, liquidity preference, conventional behavior, were all particular manifestations of the attempt to get protection against the losses that could result from the disappointment of expectations.

Introduction: Fundamental Uncertainty and Plausible Reasoning

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silva Marzetti Dall’Aste Brandolini ◽  
Roberto Scazzieri
Keyword(s):  
Plausible Reasoning ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty

“That Free Play of Human Affection”: The Humanist Ethics of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-521
Author(s):  
Thomas Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Free Play ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Fundamental Freedom ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Ethical Vision

Thomas Albrecht, “‘That Free Play of Human Affection’: The Humanist Ethics of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance” (pp. 486–521) This essay aims to refute received, persistent misconceptions of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and of aestheticism generally, as an asocial and amoral sensualism, and as a deliberate separating of art from human lives and the world. Contrary to these misconceptions, it finds a humanist ethical vision in The Renaissance, specifically in the essays Pater devotes to Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Drawing on an established post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic tradition of Victorian secular humanism, Pater defines this vision in terms of human sympathies for the feelings and suffering of other persons. And he defines it in aesthetic terms, in terms of art’s unique capacity to depict human feelings and suffering, and thereby to arouse sympathies in the viewer. At the same time, the essay contends that Pater in The Renaissance also defines his ethical vision in a more unprecedented, radical way. Beyond the solicitation of human sympathies, he frames it in terms of a fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability, a fundamental freedom and singularity, of human ethical relationships and responses. For Pater, this uncertainty and freedom are the qualities that make an ethics genuinely ethical. Pater finds these qualities, and this kind of genuine ethics, epitomized in the unpredictability and freedom of human aesthetic responses, including his own, to art and beauty.

scholarly journals Behavioral Strategy and the COVID-19 Disruption

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (8) ◽  
pp. 1322-1329
Author(s):  
Nicolai J. Foss
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Strategic Decision ◽  
Strategic Decision Making ◽  
Behavioral Strategy ◽  
Management Research ◽  
Strategy Research ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Insight Into

What can strategic management research do to help to make sense of the COVID-19 disruption, and what are the implications of the disruption for the strategy field? I argue that among the streams in strategy research, behavioral strategy is uniquely situated in terms of providing a psychologically based interpretive lens that could lend great insight into decision making in extreme conditions. However, the disruption also points to weakness in current behavioral strategy thinking, notably with respect to the role of models vis-à-vis judgment in strategic decision making, the deeply social (political, institutional) nature of strategy making, and the treatment of fundamental uncertainty.

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