Real-World Economics Review

Explain : Dean Baker 's Wisdom Quotes [Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist and co-founder, with Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. He is credited as being one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–2008 United States housing bubble.]

Explain : Dean Baker 's Wisdom Quotes [Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist and co-founder, with Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. He is credited as being one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–2008 United States housing bubble.]

from Peter Radford Are economists so befuddled by the elegance of their machinery that words have lost all meaning? Two definitions, one for ‘essential’ and the other for the way in which, according to economics, people are rewarded for their work. In recent weeks we have become accustomed to calling someone an ‘essential worker’.  These are our most important people.  They are, if the dictionary doesn’t lie, indispensable.  They are extremely important.  They are key, crucial, vital, and...

from Norbert Häring Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality. According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from...

from Jamie Morgan Part 5 of Pandemic aware economies, public health business models and (im)possible futures An economy that grows through increasing final consumption is one that evolves with final consumption and so its reproduction, stability and growth are specially dependent on it and on the associated characteristics of work and financing. It matters how people are paid, how they are contracted, what levels of debt they take on in order to work  – for example reliance on a...

from Norbert Häring Distributing additional money to stimulate demand is seen by economists as a recipe for boosting demand in a crisis. But you have to do it right, not like Donald Trump did it. In response to the corona crisis, US President Donald Trump had consumption cheques with his signature worth 1200 dollars sent to all citizens. This bears a strong resemblance to an anti-crisis recipe of economists, which has been known as helicopter money since Milton Friedman coined this term....

from David Ruccio Will colleges and universities reopen in the fall? That’s the question on the minds of many these day—administrators, faculty, staff, students, and their families, not to mention the communities in which they live. All institutions of higher education (in the United States and in much of the rest of the world) had a difficult spring, having to close their campuses for in-person instruction (as well as many other activities, from athletics to study-abroad programs) in...

from Lars Syll The abandonment of efforts to match real structures has led to disaster, as models of economic theory have grown progressively distant from reality. Attempts to fix the problem have failed to address the cause. Economists look at bad models, and say we should replace these by better models. But the process by which models are evaluated, the underlying methodology, is not examined. The real problem lies much deeper than bad models and ludicrous assumptions. Bad assumptions...

Lars Syll Though an enthusiast of reason, I believe that rational choice theory has failed abysmally, and it saddens me that this failure has brought discredit upon the very enterprise of serious theorizing in the field of social study … Rational choice theory is far too ambitious. In fact, it claims to explain everything social in terms of just three assumptions that would hold for all individuals in all social groups and in every historical period. But a Theory of Everything does not...