Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker In the last couple of weeks both the New York Times and National Public Radio have warned that China could steal a vaccine against the coronavirus, or at least steal work in the U.S. done towards developing a vaccine. Both outlets obviously thought their audiences should view this as a serious concern. As I wrote previously, it is not clear why those of us who don’t either own large amounts of stock in drug companies or give a damn about Donald Trump’s ego, should be upset...

from Asad Zaman The problem at the heart of modern economics is buried in its logical positivist foundations created in the early twentieth century by Lionel Robbins. Substantive debates and critiques of the content actually strengthen the illusion of validity of these methods, and hence are counterproductive. As Solow said about Sargent and Lucas, you do not debate cavalry tactics at Austerlitz with a madman who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte, feeding his lunacy.  Modern macroeconomic...

David Ruccio If we needed any more confirmation of who’s been laid off during the current crisis, all we need to do is examine the change in average hourly wages in the United States. In the past month (so, April 2020), the year-over-year increase in hourly wages jumped to 7.9 percent. That’s more than three times the average increase since 2008 (2.5 percent) and more than two and half times the increase since Donald Trump took office (3 percent). That doesn’t mean American workers are...

from Lars Syll It will be remembered that the seventy translators of the Septuagint were shut up in seventy separate rooms with the Hebrew text and brought out with them, when they emerged, seventy identical translations. Would the same miracle be vouchsafed if seventy multiple correlators were shut up with the same statistical material? And anyhow, I suppose, if each had a different economist perched on his a priori, that would make a difference to the outcome. J M Keynes Mainstream...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh While everyone was busy looking at the Covid-19 numbers across the world, other “stuff was happening” in international trade: the US-China trade war, which started as far back July 2018, just got significantly worse. This on-again-off-again war has been a feature of the Trump Presidency, with the man who became president of the US in January 2017 vowing to prevent the US from being “exploited” by other countries, notably China, that had benefited...

?WELCOME to the SCHOOL OF EDUCATION'S ?✏️GRAD SPOTLIGHT DAY! Stick with our social media all day to celebrate SOED! Kicking it all off with a message from Interim Dean Baker to SOED grads! ?? #MasonCEHD #Mason2020

?WELCOME to the SCHOOL OF EDUCATION'S ?✏️GRAD SPOTLIGHT DAY! Stick with our social media all day to celebrate SOED! Kicking it all off with a message from Interim Dean Baker to SOED grads! ?? #MasonCEHD #Mason2020

CEHD Interim Dean, Dr. Bob Baker welcomes you to our Spotlight Day celebrating College of Education and Human Development 2020 Graduates from the School of Kinesiology.

CEHD Interim Dean, Dr. Bob Baker welcomes you to our Spotlight Day celebrating College of Education and Human Development 2020 Graduates from the School of Kinesiology.

from Jamie Morgan Part 4 of Pandemic aware economies, public health business models and (im)possible futures One optimistic point of view hopes our economies bounce back (a deep sharp ‘v’ shape). But this seems increasingly unlikely and is now a minority position. This is partly because of a path-dependency governments are not well-equipped to quickly or easily shift. No  effective treatments are available yet for Covid-19 and even as some become available we will still be living in more...