Real-World Economics Review

From the AFEE (Association for Evolutionary Economics): February 24, 2021 Subject: An Open Letter Regarding a Proposal to Dismiss 145 Faculty Members at the University of Leicester We are shocked to hear that 145 staff members have been placed at risk of compulsory redundancy at the University of Leicester.  In particular, 16 people within the School of Business...

Julianna welcomes back recurring guest Dean Baker, Macroeconomist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, to discuss the disaster in Texas and who is going to pay for it. And how as other disasters pile up in the US, like wildfires, rapidly intensifying hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, deep freezes, heat waves, and related pandemics... will there come a point when the US economy won’t be able to handle it? Dean Baker co-founded The Center for Economic...

from C. P Chandrasekhar & Jayati Ghosh The world has been preoccupied with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies. Yet this official preoccupation with addressing the spread of infectious disease appears to have had an unanticipated negative effect: less policy attention to concerns of...

from Peter Radford Just a quick thought prompted by my reading of a talk given by Allison Stanger during the Santa Fe Institute’s 2019 Fall symposium.  First she gives us a nice quote from Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” who says the question is not … “whether we are the masters or slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and...

from Lars Syll There is first of all the central question of methodology — the logic of applying the method of multiple correlation to unanalysed economic material, which we know to be non-homogeneous through time. If we are dealing with the action of numerically measurable, independent forces, adequately analysed so that we were dealing with independent atomic factors and between them completely comprehensive, acting with fluctuating relative strength on material constant and homogeneous...

from Dean Baker I saw this piece last week on the soaring price of baseball cards, and naturally started thinking about Bitcoin. The article begins with a story about how a rare LeBron James trading card (it’s all sports cards, not just baseball cards) would now sell for over $3 million, more than ten times its price in 2016. It then reports on how the prices for rare cards of other famous players have also gone through the roof, with even cards of less great players selling for several...

from Peter Radford Are they associated? We all know that one of the central problems of economics is the existence of uncertainty.  At least since Frank Knight’s work in the 1920s, uncertainty has been something of concern to economists.  Knight’s description of uncertainty as being a condition in which no probability distribution existed, or could exist, has led some of the most eminent theorists of economics to argue that theorizing is simply not possible.  Which is a rather formidable...

from Lars Syll Being able to model a credible world, a world that somehow could be considered ‘similar’ to the real world is not the same as investigating the real world. The minimalist demand on models in terms of ‘credibility’ and ‘consistency’ has to give away to stronger epistemic demands. Claims in a ‘consistent’ model do not per se give a warrant for exporting the claims to real-world target systems. Questions of external validity are important more specifically also when it comes...

from Peter Radford Keeping the conversation going. Let’s start with Shannon, from his personal papers published in 1993 … “The word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory.  It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition.  It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account...

from Lars Syll Mathematical modelling has now dominated the economics academy for so long that younger people that emerge from economic studies who are dissatisfied with what they are taught, cannot think beyond the modelling. They have been immersed in it so long that it is a kind of common sense to them. The idea that modelling is bound to be almost always irrelevant just does not compute for many. Yet they recognize that modern academic economics mostly does not provide any insights....