Real-World Economics Review

from  Karim Errouaki and WEA Commentaries The health, economic, social and political crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic will reconfigure the geopolitics of international relations and globalization. We are only at the beginning of this crisis, particularly on the economic and social fronts. Many sectors, such as tourism, transportation and entertainment, will only recover over a very long time; many jobs will be destroyed. In contrast, other sectors are insufficiently developed and...

This conference is open for submissions  SUBMIT YOUR PAPER Call for Papers The United States declared an economic war on China in early 2018. Economic warfare is a unilateral action that questions the existence of multilateralism and places the question of what regime we are about to enter after the weakening of the existing multilateral trade agencies. US trade policy opens the door for new relationships between emerging market economies and international financial institutions on...

from Lars Syll But I do not believe that the route to sounder economic reasoning will involve an abandonment of economists’ penchant for reasoning with the use of models. Models allow the internal consistency of a proposed argument to be checked with greater precision; they allow more finely-grained differentiation among alternative hypotheses, and they allow longer and more subtle chains of reasoning to be deployed without both author and reader becoming hopelessly tangled in them. Nor...

from Peter Radford and WEA Commentaries I have been digging around a fair bit lately trying to understand the role of economics in the extent of the inequality being laid bare by the pandemic — more on that later.  A few interesting nuggets worthy of a quick note popped out along the way. Thomas Phillipon opens chapter one of his recent book this way: “The big debates in economics are about growth and inequality.  As economists, we seek to understand how and why countries grow and how...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care about....

from Lars Syll In L. J. Savage’s seminal The Foundations of Satistics the reader is invited to tackle the problem of an uncertain future using the concept of ‘lottery tickets’ and the principle of ‘look before you leap.’ Carried to its logical extreme, the ‘Look before you leap’ principle demands that one envisage every conceivable policy for the government of his whole life (at least from now on) in its most minute details, in the light of the vast number of unknown states of the world,...

The U.S., China, and the New Cold Warriors — Dean Baker On the days when he is not celebrating his friendship and trade deals with China’s president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump has sought to hype China as the United States’ major enemy in the world. This has meant not only absurd allegations about the pandemic (top Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that China deliberately sent infected people to the U.S. to spread the virus and damage the U.S. economy), but...

The U.S., China, and the New Cold Warriors — Dean Baker On the days when he is not celebrating his friendship and trade deals with China’s president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump has sought to hype China as the United States’ major enemy in the world. This has meant not only absurd allegations about the pandemic (top Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that China deliberately sent infected people to the U.S. to spread the virus and damage the U.S. economy), but also sanctions,...

from The New York Times David Graeber, the radical anthropologist, provocative critic of economic and social inequality and self-proclaimed anarchist who was a coiner of “We Are the 99 Percent,” the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Venice. He was 59. His death was announced on social media by his wife, Nika Dubrovsky, an artist. She did not specify the cause, but Dr. Graeber reported on YouTube last week that he had been feeling ill. A...