Real-World Economics Review

from Blair Fix I recently read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. If you’re not familiar, David Graeber is the anthropologist who wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years, a seminal book on the history of money and credit. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber takes aim at pointless work. Graeber describes a bullshit job as: a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the...

from Dean Baker Recently, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell reported on the negative reactions of college presidents to the idea of free public college. The context was a media dinner with a dozen college presidents, most of whom were leading non-flagship public schools, according to Rampell. The presidents were asked if they thought it was likely that the government would adopt free college along the lines proposed by presidential candidates Senators Bernie Sanders and...

from Lars Syll There really is something about the way macroeconomists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. Empirical evidence still only plays a minor role in mainstream economic theory, where models largely function as a substitute for empirical evidence. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist...

from Asad  Zaman When we think about epistemology (theory of knowledge), then we are doing meta-thinking. That is, we are thinking about thoughts people have, which they think is “knowledge”.  Because there are many many wrong ideas, and very few right ideas, we must learn to think critically. Unless we do so, our thoughts will be captured by the enormous amounts of fake news which circulates on social media these days. Thinking about thinking, or Meta-Thought, is very different from the...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh Anyone who has been following the upsurge of protests across the country in the wake of the CAA-NRC moves of the government would have been impressed and inspired by the role played by young women. They have been forthright and fearless in articulating their concerns and demands, even in the face of overt repression by the state, and there is no doubt that they provide much hope for the future of the country. These young women have already...

James Dean with chat baker.

Dean Baker - Spoken Poetry - Aphorisms in Motion - Copyright © 2019 Please post a comment if you watched and enjoyed this. :) Book Title: Aphorisms In Motion Author: Dean Baker (writer/vocals) Visuals: TheGlitch Music: The Doors This video is strictly Copyright © 2015-2019 and not to be copied or distributed for profit or not for profit without the written consent of its owner Dean Baker. IG: DeanRavenBaker If you enjoy this spoken poetry, spread the word and let me know. Maybe it'll...

Dean Baker - Spoken Poetry - Aphorisms in Motion - Copyright © 2019 Please post a comment if you watched and enjoyed this. :) Book Title: Aphorisms In Motion Author: Dean Baker (writer/vocals) Visuals: TheGlitch Music: The Doors This video is strictly Copyright © 2015-2019 and not to be copied or distributed for profit or not for profit without the written consent of its owner Dean Baker. IG: DeanRavenBaker If you enjoy this spoken poetry, spread the word and let me know....

from Lars Syll Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John Cochrane And the tiny little problem? It’s utterly and completely...

from Asad Zaman Foundations for modern social sciences were laid in the early twentieth century, and were strongly influenced by logical positivism. The central idea of positivism is that science is true and valid because it deals (principally) with observables, while religion is false and invalid because it deals (principally) with unobservables. For a detailed discussion, see “Logical Positivism and Islamic Economics“.   Later, logical positivism had a spectacular collapse. It became...