Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker I have written many times that I thought the focus on wealth inequality, as opposed to income inequality, was misplaced. There are many practical, political, and legal problems associated with taxing wealth that are considerably smaller when we talk about altering the economic structures that redistribute so much income upward. But beyond the issue of whether inequalities of income or wealth are more easily tackled, there is also a very strange argument for focusing on...

from Peter Radford The economy as a sea of information, constantly churning, far from equilibrium, with computation its key activity.  It is complex.  It is inscrutable to any method that fails to accommodate its multitude of layers, interconnections, feedback loops, and constant dynamism.  Since reading Ilya Prigogine ages ago I have never understood how anyone could not view the economy through such a lens.  The interplay between creative forces needed to sustain life and the constant...

from Robert Wade and RWER issue no.92 The bottom line is that North and South are coherent blocs in important ways. The income gap between the North-South blocs is – persistently – larger than the income gaps within them. If we plot the share of world population living in countries arranged by average income we see a pronounced bimodal distribution, with not much population in between. Countries of the North enjoy common economic benefits from their superior position in the world...

Fred Zimmerman  (originally a comment) Taken together, the chapters of Anthropologies of Unemployment, New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, edited by Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Laneby reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of...

from Lars Syll Econometricians typically hail the evolution of econometrics as a “big success”. For example, Geweke et al. (2006) argue that “econometrics has come a long way over a relatively short period” … Pagan (1987) describes econometrics as “outstanding success” because the work of econometric theorists has become “part of the process of economic investigation and the training of economists” … These claims represent no more than self-glorifying rhetoric … The widespread use of...

from Ikonoclast  (originally a comment) n C21 Piketty was exposing the automatic outcomes of an axiom-based legal law, regulation and financial system. The real economy is a real system (obviously). The financial economy is a formal system whose operations are prescribed by its axioms. Our system of legal laws, regulations, financial rules and financial calculations (bookkeeping and national accounts) is a formal, prescriptive system founded on ideological property axioms and calculated...

from Dean Baker Apparently at the New York Times the answer is no. Elisabeth Rosenthal, who is a very insightful writer on health care issues, had a column this morning warning that we may face very high prices for a coronavirus vaccine. She points out that this is in spite of the fact that the government is paying for much of the cost of the research. Rosenthal then argues we should adopt a system of price controls or negotiations, as is done in every other wealthy country. While her...

from Steven Pressman and RWER issue no.92 Thomas Piketty established his professional reputation by using income tax returns to measure income distribution over long time periods in several nations. Long before Capital in the Twenty-First Century (hereafter C21) appeared, Piketty (2001; 2003; & Saez, 2003) showed that, in many capitalist countries, income flowed to the top 1% (really the top .1%). C21 made two new contributions – a theory to explain this phenomenon, r>g, and a...

from Lars Syll Thus luxury is being hollowed out. For in the middle of general fungibility, happiness clings without exception to what is not fungible. No exertion of humanity, no formal reasoning can alter the fact that the clothing which shimmers like a fairy-tale is worn by the one and only, not by twenty-thousand others. Under capitalism, the utopia of the qualitative — what by virtue of its difference and uniqueness does not enter into the ruling exchange relationship — flees into...

from Girol Karacaoglu and RWER issue no.92 The growing disparity across generations, in their access to material sources of wellbeing such as income and wealth (including housing), has been well documented (Ingraham 2019, Wolf 2018). Figure 2 provides an example referring to the growing disparity of wealth across generations in the USA (Ingraham 2019). As Ingraham explains, “baby boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 – collectively owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth by the time...