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Real-World Economics Review

The Inequality Crisis: The three options

Amazon  US  UK  DE  FR  ES  IT  JP  CA The everyday operations of our economies produce the goods and services that keep us alive and enable us to enjoy life. But that is not the only way that those operations effect our lives; they also effect societies and ecosystems. The Inequality Crisis, which threatens our societies, and the Climate Crisis, which threatens both our societies and our species, are also, no less than production, brought about directly by the everyday operations of our...

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Revealed preference theory — much ado about almost nothing

from Lars Syll Twenty-seven years ago yours truly wrote an article on revealed preference theory that got published in History of Political Economy (no. 25, 1993). Paul Samuelson wrote a kind letter and informed me that he was the one who had recommended it for publication. But although he liked a lot in it, he also wrote a comment — published in the same volume of HOPE — saying: Between 1938 and 1947, and since then as Pålsson Syll points out, I have been scrupulously careful not to...

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Patent monopolies in prescription drugs cause corruption # 43,508

from Dean Baker Economists and economic reporters all know that tariffs can lead to corruption. The idea is that if a government-imposed tariff raises the price of a product by 10-25 percent above the free market price, companies have a large incentive to find ways to avoid the tariff. This can mean reclassifying imports to get around the tariff or trying to curry favor with politicians to get exemptions. The New York Times and ProPublica have run several excellent pieces providing...

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Game theory — theory with little substantive content

from Lars Syll I don’t see that we are even entitled to assume that reality accords to some model that humans are able to envisage … To say that Pandora knows what decision model she is facing can therefore be taken as meaning no more than that she is committed to proceeding as though her model were true … The price of abandoning psychology for revealed-preference theory is therefore high. We have to give up any pretension to be offering a causal explanation of Pandora’s choice behavior...

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Wealth that results only from a change in the exchange-value of some goods relative to others

from Andri Stahel and RWER issue 93 As will be argued, a great part – and increasingly so – of the capital gains result from an inflationary increase in the monetary value of given financial assets and not from productive employment of capital, generating both capital-income and new wealth on its wake. Thus, we overlook the effect of the different kinds of capital both in fostering or not overall economic activity and the effect of that which has been termed “financialisation” on the...

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Why game theory fails to live up to its promise

from Lars Syll Why, it might be objected, should the goal of social science be mere causal explanations of particular events? Isn’t such an attitude more the province of the historian? Social science should instead be concentrating on systematic knowledge. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, this objection concludes, is a laudable example of exactly that – a piece of theory that sheds light over many different cases. In reply, we certainly agree that regularities or models that...

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issue no. 93 of RWER

download whole issue Why are the rich getting richer while the poor stay poor?      2Andri W. Stahel Machina-economicus or homo-complexicus: Artificial intelligence and the future of economics?      18Gregory A. Daneke Maybe there never was a unipower      40John Benedetto Empirical rejection of mainstream economics’ core postulates – on prices, firms’ profits and markets structure      61Joaquim Vergés-Jaime Humanism or racism: pilot project Europe at the crossroads      76Hardy...

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Political Economy

from Asad Zaman This is a sequence of posts on “New Directions in Macroeconomics“, which discusses the numerous directions of research which must be incorporated to create a viable Macroeconomics for the 21st Century. We have previously discussed “Post-Keynesian Economics“, and “Modern Monetary Theory“. This post discusses the necessity of re-incorporating politics into economics. Once we recognize the importance of history and institutions, it becomes clear that economic problems cannot...

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