Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll As Oskar Morgenstern noted already back in his 1928 classic Wirtschaftsprognose: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten, economic predictions and forecasts amount to little more than intelligent guessing. Making forecasts and predictions obviously isn’t a trivial or costless activity, so why then go on with it? The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really underlines how important it is for social sciences to incorporate...

To sign on to this letter, please click here. We are shocked and horrified to learn of the terrible attack on the Jawaharlal Nehru University on the evening on 5 January 202, by a group of armed goons who targeted a peaceful gathering of teachers and students. We note that this terrible event comes in the wake of a prolonged struggle by the students against a fee hike that would force nearly half of them to abandon their studies, and after an even longer series of protests by the faculty...

from Asad Zaman It is important to understand that there are three type of models, corresponding the following diagram. The simplest type of model is a pattern in the data that we observe. A second type of model is a “mental model”. This is a structure we create in our own minds, in order to understand the patterns that we see in the observations. The third type of model is a structure of the hidden real world, which generates the patterns that we see. Some examples will be helpful in...

from Lars Syll Professor Swann (2019) seems implicitly to be endorsing the traditional theorem/proof style for teaching econometrics but with a few more theorems to be memorized. This style of teaching prepares students to join the monks in Asymptopia, a small pristine mountain village, where the monks read the tomes, worship the god of Consistency, and pray all day for the coming of the Revelation, when the estimates with an infinite sample will be revealed. Dirty limited real data sets...

from Norbert Häring The OECD and the EU want to change international tax principles to curb tax evasion. The United States is opposed to the plans as they would affect its internet companies and other US multinationals. The US has stepped up its fight against taxes on digital corporations. Shortly after President Donald Trump’s threat of special tariffs on French goods, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked all countries in early December to abandon similar plans for taxes that would...

Source: World Inequality Database

from Lars Syll To be ‘analytical’ is something most people find recommendable. The word ‘analytical’ has a positive connotation. Scientists think deeper than most other people because they use ‘analytical’ methods. In dictionaries, ‘analysis’ is usually defined as having to do with “breaking something down.” But that’s not the whole picture. As used in science, analysis usually means something more specific. It means to separate a problem into its constituent elements so to reduce complex...

from Asad Zaman Empiricism holds that observations are all that we have. We cannot penetrate through the observations to the hidden reality which generates these observations. Here is a picture which illustrates the empiricist view of the world: The wild and complex reality generates signals which we observe using our five senses. The aspects of reality which we can observe are the only things that we can know about reality. The true nature of hidden reality, as it really is, independent...

from Lars Syll In his history of experimental social science — Randomistas: How radical researchers are changing our world (Yale University Press, 2018) — Andrew Leigh gives an introduction to the RCT (randomized controlled trial) method for conducting experiments in medicine, psychology, development economics, and policy evaluation. Although it mentions there are critiques that can be waged against it, the author does not let that shadow his overwhelmingly enthusiastic view on RCT. Among...

from Edward Fullbrook Here is a passage from an article that appeared last week in The Guardian. With one day of trading to go, 2019 is on course to be one of the strongest in the history of financial markets after shares around the world racked up record after record in another barnstorming year. On Wall Street the Dow Jones industrial average has gone up almost 25% having reached record highs day after day, while the broader S&P500 is up 30% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq has grown 40%...