Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll We have already shown that deficit spending increases our collective savings. But what happens if Uncle Sam borrows when he runs a deficit? Is that wht eats up savings and forces interest rates higher? The answer is no. The financial crowding-out story asks us to imagine that there’s a fixed supply of savings from which anyone can attempt to borrow … MMT rejects the loanable funds story, which is rooted in the idea that borrowing is limited by access to scarce financial...

from David Ruccio  The phrase, which was used in the early nineteenth century to describe the the spoils system of appointing government workers, accurately describes the American economy today.* And it’s pretty clear who the victor is, and it’s not the working-class. Instead, a small group at the top have come out as the victor—and that’s been true for decades now. How do we know? Well, all we have to do is look at the growing gap between the amount produced by American workers and...

from Dean Baker We are really in an unprecedented period where the economy is trying to recover from the shutdowns of April and May while being faced with partial shutdowns due to the resurgence of the pandemic in large parts of the country. We are struggling to make sense of data, which often has a substantial lag. We are still getting data from July even as we are in the last weeks of August. Furthermore, when we have large monthly changes, the picture at the end of July could have been...

from Lars Syll The reason you study an issue at all is usually that you care about it, that there’s something you want to achieve or see happen. Motivation is always there; the trick is to do all you can to avoid motivated reasoning that validates what you want to hear. In my experience, modeling is a helpful tool (among others) in avoiding that trap, in being self-aware when you’re starting to let your desired conclusions dictate your analysis. Why? Because when you try to write down a...

from Peter Radford I suspect economic theorists are not alone in shunting to the side issues or phenomena that might upset the applecart.  But they appear to do it with a determination that other disciplines mind find somewhat alarming.  This is why I relentlessly and repeatedly mention Cause and his 1937 question about the existence of the firm.  It isn’t because I imagine that theories of the firm began in 1937, or that they are somehow restricted to a peculiar Anglo-Saxon view — Coase...

from Dean Baker We are still very much in the middle of the pandemic, with the U.S. seeing tens of thousands of new infections daily, and the world experiencing hundreds of thousands of new infections. However, it is not too early to look at areas where we need to reevaluate public policy, most importantly in financing the research and development of new drugs and vaccines. The accepted wisdom in policy circles has been, that while the government can finance basic research, we need to...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economists and commentators, it seems, are worried that the global economy is going to come crashing down as a result of the COVID crisis. That’s why they’re willing now to consider the possibility that the current crisis is more than a normal recession, more serious even than the so-called Great Recession; in their view, it’s an economic depression. That, at least, is the argument they present up front. But there’s something else going on, which haunts their...

from Lars Syll Why would an academic profession sanction the use of theories based on crassly unrealistic assumptions? It is not an intuitively attractive idea. One suspects that the underlying reason is: economists are, in the main, committed to the defense of propositions that cannot be generated by models based on realistic assumptions. For example, a long string of unrealistic assumptions are necessary to generate the desired conclusion that unregulated financial markets perform...

from Erik Reinert and issue 92 of RWER In complete contradiction to the ruling practice of the Marshall Plan at the time, Paul Samuelson started building what was to become Cold War economic theory with two articles in The Economic Journal in 1948 and 1949. Communism advanced under the utopian slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. With his renewed interpretation of David Ricardo, Paul Samuelson produced a counter-utopia: under the standard...

from Ann Pettifor and issue 92 of RWER Today as the world endures the crisis of a global pandemic, “an old order is ending in convulsions”. So writes Rebecca Spang, historian of the French revolution in The Atlantic (Spang, 2020). In the 1790s, money, debt and the non-payment of taxes by France’s rentiers, played a critical role in revolutionizing France. Today purveyors of money and debt – creditors, investors and speculators – both avoid taxes and prey on a global economy radically...