Real-World Economics Review

The eight hour working day was a long standing aim of organized labor. For decades it seemed unattainable. ‘International competition’ often was a main reason why countries stubbornly refused to introduce it. But from 1915 on and starting in Uruguay it suddenly spread all over the world. Within a few years, in many countries the six day eight hour working week had become the new normal. Corona won’t end the world. After World War I and despite the Spanish flu many countries rapidly...

from Lars Syll Until [2008], when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics … I had heard that it was a very difficult book and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes’s earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised by, or inclined to challenge, the claim made in 1992 by...

from David Ruccio It’s now an almost daily occurrence: Donald Trump starring in the White House pandemic briefings, flanked by business executives—from Walgreens, CVS, Target and a host of laboratory, research, and medical-device corporations—to form a mutual admiration society.* The various scientists, public-health experts, and emergency personnel, the ones people want to hear from, are accorded third rank. And American workers are nowhere to be seen—or heard—even when, as on 24 March,...

from Lars Syll To observe that economics is based on a superficial view of individual and social behaviour does not seem to me to be much of an insight. I think it is exactly this superficiality that gives economics much of the power that it has. Its ability to predict human behaviour without knowing very much about the make up and lives of the people whose behaviour we are trying to understand. Robert Lucas The purported strength of Chicago — New Classical — macroeconomics is that it has...

Economist Dean Baker explains how the $2.2 trillion stimulus quietly provides up to $17 billion in loans for Boeing with almost no strings attached. Director/Video Editor: Taylor Hebden Visual Producer: Andrew Corkery Chase Producer: Genevieve Montinar Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

from Dean Baker There have been a number of pieces in major news outlets telling us what the recovery will look like from this recession. Most have been pretty negative. The important thing to know about these forecasts is that the people making these forecasts don’t have a clue what they are talking about. The shape of recovery will depend first and foremost on the extent to which the coronavirus is contained or is treatable, areas in which most of our prognosticators have zero...

from David Ruccio In the United States and around the world, governments are responding to the twin pandemics—of novel coronavirus and escalating unemployment—with massive bailouts. Not unlike what happened more than a decade ago, after the global crash of 2007-08. But there seems to be something different this time around—not only because of the speed of both the viral contamination and the economic meltdown, but also as a reaction to the terms of the bailout that was enacted in the...

from Lars Syll What will be the lasting effects of the covid-19 pandemic? Start with the size of the state. Over the next year government debt will rise sharply, as spending jumps and tax revenues collapse. When the economy recovers, attention will turn to paying it down. “Capital and Ideology”, a new book by Thomas Piketty, shows that after the first and second world wars many governments in the West turned to heavier taxation of the incomes and wealth of the richest to achieve that goal...