Real-World Economics Review

from Blair Fix When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule. For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency. When judging Bitcoin’s energy demands, the advocates...

from Peter Radford Words are not ideas.  They are our means to capture ideas and make them tangible.  The problem is that words are a porous net that inevitably lets some accuracy slip away, but sometimes captures irrelevant detail that shines brightly in the moment and then dulls in the light of later thought. Trying to define something so a discussion can follow without ambiguity in meaning sliding in and muddying things.  Slippery isn’t it? How about this: “I sometimes wish we could...

from Dean Baker This simple point was left out of a Washington Post article on the legal battle surrounding the Biden Administration’s efforts to negotiate lower prices for drugs purchased by Medicare. This point is important because the drug companies are definitely not trying to get the government out of the market, as the industry claims. The industry is effectively insisting that the government is obligated to give it an unrestricted monopoly for the period of its patent duration....

from Lars Syll Time is a scarce resource on television. However, if one still — as is so often the case nowadays — uses precious airtime for trivial matters and meaningless ‘entertainment,’ there must be a reason. Television is — still — for a large part of the population one of the primary sources of information and worldview. Thus, filling program schedules with trivialities becomes an effective means to — instead of functioning as an instrument for shaping opinions and fostering...

from Dean Baker Peter Coy used his column yesterday to beg President Biden not to use the term “greedflation” to explain the runup in inflation since the pandemic. I am sympathetic to much of his argument, most importantly, the idea that corporations suddenly turned greedy is a bit far out. As Coy notes, corporations are always greedy. The real question is whether something unusual was going on with corporate profits in the pandemic. There clearly was an increase in profit margins in the...

from Jayati Ghosh Economics needs greater humility, a better sense of history, and more diversity The need for drastic change in the economics discipline has never been so urgent. Humanity faces existential crises, with planetary health and environmental challenges becoming major concerns. The global economy was already limping and fragile before the pandemic; the subsequent recovery has exposed deep and worsening inequalities not just in incomes and assets but in access to basic human...

 New book from WEA Books At the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 and the lockdown practices imposed worldwide generated a global economic crisis that challenges the traditional explanations of economic downturns .  Like the economic crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was systemic and global, and this collection of essays examines it in a broad geographical and historical context. Kindle $6.00                  Paperback $14.99Amazon US   UK   FR  DE   IN ...

from Lars Syll Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference functions so that they are “other-regarding”. But even with these modified...

Pavlina R.Tchemevra is the source of the data for this chart which appeared in September 2014 in the New York Times in an article by Neil Irwin “The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans”.  Can anyone source or provide an updated version of this chart?  

There is no ‘tragedy of the Commons.’ But a tragedy of the absence of Commons-as organizations, let’s call it ‘the tragedy of uncommons’, does exist. Below, I will provide the example of the island of Ameland in the Northern Netherlands, in line with the historical examples of successful Commons mentioned by Elinor Ostrom (especially those for Switzerland).  Ownership is a multi-dimensional concept. Up to the 1795 revolution, the island of Ameland, north of Friesland, was not a part...