Real-World Economics Review

Mass of Christian Burial for Richard "Dick" Dean Baker

Let’s start to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible. This will, together with other technological solutions like air purifiers, UV-C lamps as well as large scale fast testing, enable us to escape the cycle of alternating lock downs. It will also enable us to at least pursue a policy of total eradication of Covid-19. Lock downs work – for a while. They can buy us time. But the economic, social and psychological consequences are immense and we will have to rely as much...

from Lars Syll  In practice, what math does is let macro-economists locate the FWUTVs [facts with unknown truth values] farther away from the discussion of identification … Relying on a micro-foundation lets an author say, “Assume A, assume B, …  blah blah blah … And so we have proven that P is true. Then the model is identified.” … Distributional assumptions about error terms are a good place to bury things because hardly anyone pays attention to them. Moreover, if a critic does see that...

from Ikonoclast (originally a comment) The challenge is to develop a valid ontology for economics. In medicine, early theories of disease failed to yield efficacious treatments because their ontology (a theory of basic real existents and how they interact) was wrong. A few of the more common ideas founded on false ontologies were that diseases were caused by evil spirits, miasma and imbalances of the four humors. It was not until the advent of the germ theory of disease that real progress...

from Lars Syll In an issue of the journal Fronesis yours truly and a couple of other academics (e.g. Julie Nelson, Tony Lawson, and Phil Mirowski) made an effort at introducing its readers to heterodox economics and its critique of mainstream economics. Rather unsurprisingly this hasn’t pleased the Swedish economics establishment. On the mainstream economics blog Ekonomistas, professor Daniel Waldenström rode out to defend the mainstream with the nowadays standard defence — heterodox...

Follow on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/actdottv Julianna welcomes back recurring guest Dean Baker, Macroeconomist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, to discuss how now that we’re only a few months away from having a new President, Progressive groups are joining forces to demand the change we’re owed for delivering Joe Biden his win... and where Progressive groups are expecting real change is the economy. Dean talks about what’s possible with a...

M2020-00374-COA-R3-CV Court of Appeals Middle Section

from Jayati Ghosh Recently, mainstream economics has been forced to acknowledge some of the explicit and implicit forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in the discipline, thanks in particular to some brave interventions by some women economists. The focus of these interventions has been on still-pervasive patriarchal and racist attitudes that are evident within the discipline in the Global North, particularly in the United States – such as the now-famous blog by Claudia Sahm:...

from Dean Baker We know that Republican office holders are not allowed to say that Joe Biden won the election. Apparently there is a similar ban in place for news outlets when it comes to the question of the United States collaborating with China, and other countries, in developing vaccines against the pandemic. In recent days, there have been articles in several major news outlets about how China vaccinated close to 1 million people, under an Emergency Use Authorization, for vaccines...

from Lars Syll Paul Samuelson claimed that the “ergodic hypothesis” is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume that ergodicity is essential to economics? The answer can only be – as I have argued here here here here and here – NO WAY! Obviously yours truly is far from the only scientist being critical of Paul Samuelson. This is what Ole Peters writes in a highly interesting article on Samuelson’s stance on the...