Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker The New York Times had an article discussing the prospects for U.S. trade relations with China during Biden’s presidency. At one point it tells readers: “Mr. Biden has given few details about his plans for U.S.-China relations, other than saying he wants to recruit American allies such as Europe and Japan to pressure China to make economic reforms, like protecting intellectual property.” Stronger and longer patent and copyright protections have redistributed enormous...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar In a move that was expected, the US Justice Department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against internet search giant Google, alleging that it resorts to anti-competitive practices to ensure its dominance in the search engine space and, through that, over the related online advertising revenues. As a leading example the case cites the successful effort to exclude the competition through a deal, in place since 2005, in which Google pays Apple around $8-12 billion a...

from Lars Syll Modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In his seminal book Economics and Reality (1997) Tony Lawson traced this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject. It is — sad to say — as relevant today as it was twenty-three years ago. It is still a fact that within mainstream economics internal validity is everything and external validity nothing. Why anyone should be...

from Dean Baker Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle was anxious to tell readers that drug development in the pandemic has been a great success story. After all, look at all the treatments we have, and now it appears that Pfizer/BioNtech have developed a highly effective vaccine. What could be better than that? Well, first we need a bit of perspective. Yes, we place an enormous value on our health and our lives, so getting effective treatments and vaccines quickly are extremely...

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens.  Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc.  The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors.  For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those...

fromC. P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world. The experience of the pandemic is probably the most extreme and definitive expression of that: the ability of China to contain the spread of the virus and prevent a renewed outbreak of any substantive nature is unmatched by almost all other countries, with the exception of a few outliers. The reasons for this certainly deserve separate...

from Lars Syll The assumption of additivity and linearity means that the outcome variable is, in reality, linearly related to any predictors … and that if you have several predictors then their combined effect is best described by adding their effects together …  This assumption is the most important because if it is not true then even if all other assumptions are met, your model is invalid because you have described it incorrectly. It’s a bit like calling your pet cat a dog: you can try...

from Jamie Morgan and RWER issue 93 [D]egrowth advocates tend to question the naturalisation of growth and objectification of an economy as though we had no alternative, they do highlight the structural conditions that lead to exploitation in the name of progress. For example, Gerber states: “The ideology of growth – or growthism – is at the core of capitalism. Growthism sustains capitalism politically because it allows avoiding redistribution by giving the impression that everyone will...

from John Benedetoo and RWER issue 93 In the 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream economists railed against heterodox economists and non-economist thinkers for questioning the appropriateness of “free trade” and for advocating national industrial policies. The debate was resolved, at least among the arbiters of acceptability, in favor of the mainstream economists. And yet, the heterodox arguments ring now like the unheeded warnings of prophets, while the mainstream economic view looks more...