Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in wh ich the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … This perspective is tantamount to assuming a population machine that spawns individuals forever (i.e., the analog to a coin that...

from Ikonoclast (originally posted as a comment) There is clearly a strong correlation between science denialism and COVID-19 case rates in developed and semi-developed countries. Capitalism has an ambivalent relationship with science. Capitalists love production science and technology, including of course mining, industrial, consumerist, military, security, control and persuasion techs but they hate impact science. The impact sciences of course measure the impacts of science and...

from Norbert Häring From March 2021 people with an “I’ve got nothing to hide” attitude will be able to get around border and ticket controls at St Pancras International Station in London on their way to the Continent via the Eurostar, All they will have to do is upload a suitable portrait photo and a copy of their identity document to a government server. Then, instead of standing in a queue, they can walk down a camera-tagged “biometric corridor” without having to show a document. The...

The June issue of The New Republic included a feature by Dean Baker, “Building An Economy That Works Again – A Practical Blueprint for Reform in the Wake of the Coronavirus Shutdown”. TNR talks with Baker about the inevitable contraction of our economy and politically feasible policies he puts forth in his article that we could undertake to build a prosperous and equitable economic future. Featuring: Dean Baker – Senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a...

The June issue of The New Republic included a feature by Dean Baker, “Building An Economy That Works Again – A Practical Blueprint for Reform in the Wake of the Coronavirus Shutdown”. TNR talks with Baker about the inevitable contraction of our economy and politically feasible policies he puts forth in his article that we could undertake to build a prosperous and equitable economic future. Featuring: Dean Baker – Senior economist at the Center for Economic and...

from Lars Syll Economics is a discipline with the avowed ambition to produce theory for the real world. But it fails in this ambition, Lars Pålsson Syll asserts in Chapter 12, at least as far as the dominant mainstream neoclassical economic theory is concerned. Overly confident in deductivistic Euclidian methodology, neoclassical economic theory lines up series of mathematical models that display elaborate internal consistency but lack clear counterparts in the real world. Such models are...

from Asad Zaman What is the nature of the world in which I live? As I look around me, I see walls, windows, doors, and furniture. But these are insignificant parts of the world as constructed by my mind. I conceptualize the world through the teachings of history, according to which human history started in the remote past, with hunter-gatherers. I have a smattering of knowledge of the ancient civilizations of Sumeria and Babylon, and much more of the Roman Empire. The rise of...

from Lars Syll James Heckman, winner of the “Nobel Prize” in economics (2000), did an interview with John Cassidy in 2010. It’s an interesting read (Cassidy’s words in italics): What about the rational-expectations hypothesis, the other big theory associated with modern Chicago? How does that stack up now? I could tell you a story about my friend and colleague Milton Friedman. In the nineteen-seventies, we were sitting in the Ph.D. oral examination of a Chicago economist who has gone on...