Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford We all thought that this morning’s announcement of the new claims for jobless insurance would be shocking.  The usual scuttle in the financial markets had been that we might see numbers well over 2,000,000, but the actual number soared even beyond that.  At 3,283,000 it is difficult to articulate what this means.  To put it in some sort of perspective, the previous week had seen 282,000 new claims, and the previous all-time record high of 695,000 had been set back in...

from an article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam in yesterday’s Guardian Dominic Cummings [Chief Adviser to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson] loves to theorise about complexity, but he’s getting it all wrong. . . . The error in the UK is on two levels. Modelling and policymaking. First, at the modelling level, the government relied at all stages on epidemiological models that were designed to show us roughly what happens when a preselected set of actions are made, and not what...

from David Ruccio The Labor Department on Thursday reported the number of American workers filing new claims for jobless benefits last week rose to 3.28 million from 282,000 a week earlier. Nothing in the 53-year history of the series comes close. In the worst week of 2009, when the job market was reeling, initial claims hit 665,000. Worse, the millions in new claims don’t reflect all the people who were pushed out of jobs last week as the novel coronavirus crisis emptied out Main...

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

from Lars Syll Paul Krugman has repeatedly over the years argued that we should continue to use neoclassical hobby horses like IS-LM and Aggregate Supply-Aggregate Demand models. Here’s one example: So why do AS-AD? … We do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we may all be dead, but that we also have a tendency to return to full employment via price flexibility. Or to put it differently, you do want...

from today’s Guardian The Covid-19 crisis has revealed what governments are capable of doing and shone a new light on the motivation for past policies and their outcomes, said Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, and chair of the commission of the social determinants of health at the World Health Organisation. “The overriding objective [of governments for the last decade] has been austerity, and life expectancy for the worst-off has...

Yesterday, the number of Corona deaths in Italy rose to 919. In one day. According to Eurostat,  the 2018 total Italian death tally was 633,000. Which translates to on average 1,734 deaths a day meaning that the level of Corona deaths was over half of the ‘normal’ amount of deaths. Already. Despite the lock down. Dear people: this is much worse than a bad flu. And it is as bad as the Spanish flu. Which is supposed to have killed, around 1919,  about 50,000,000 people. FYI: the latest...