Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll We welcome Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman’s contribution and the debate it has inspired. We share much of their agenda for an economics “beyond neoliberalism” … Nonetheless, we believe that Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman do not go far enough in their calls for reform. The vision they paint is still focused on the discipline of economics and anchored in the core ideas of neoclassical theory that dominated the field in the twentieth century … The behavioral economics critique of the...

from Lars Syll [embedded content]

from David Ruccio Motto In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. – Bertolt Brecht ( trans. John Willett, from the Svendborg Poems) I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus for the past two months (the last real post, aside from daily cartoons, was back in January). But readers have encouraged me to get back in the game and resume my “occasional” commentary on economics, culture, and society. Right now, in these dark times—as the number of...

from Bernard Beaudreau and RWER #91 Economics is both a social and non-social (pure and applied) science, social in its quest to understand human behavior in the realm of goods and services, and non-social in its understanding of material processes – that is, the way in which goods and services (our bread and butter) are produced. It therefore stands to reason that for it to be successful, it must decipher how human beings think, and second, how inanimate material processes behave. It...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA – Subscribers: 26,420 subscribe RWER Blog ISSN 1755-9472– A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,468 members, join – Sister open access journals: Economic Thought and WEA Commentaries– WEA Online Conferences back issues issue no. 91 16 March 2020download whole issue Complexity, the evolution of macroeconomic thought, and micro foundationsDavid Colander 2 Models and reality: How did models...

from Lars Syll Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity of human ensembles. Many scientists agree that ergodicity is one of the most important concepts in statistics. So, what is it? Suppose you are concerned with determining what the most visited parks in a city are. One idea is to take a momentary snapshot: to see how many people...