Real-World Economics Review

2024 WEA Online Conference. CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY 80 YEARS LATER – the relevance of the issues raised by Schumpeter   On the WEA Conference website, you can find all the details for submissions and participation: https://schumpeter2024.weaconferences.net/ Starting from Schumpeter’s book, this WEA Online Conference, led by Arturo Hermann and Maria Alejandra Madi, would promote an open debate on how these concepts of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy characterise our...

from Lars Syll With any phenomenon of interest, understanding its nature or essential properties allows us to relate to, or interact with, it in more knowledgeable and competent ways than would otherwise be the case … A surprising number of social theorists, when embarking on substantive analyses, pay almost no attention at all to insights bearing on the nature of these (or any other) factors. Instead, the preferred option is to select the types of methods, procedures or tools to be...

Claudia Goldin won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. I can write about her work. But here, I will be inspired by her work. One of the events she emphasizes is that women’s participation in the ‘GDP’ labor market became less after say 1860, as shown in the figure. Below I will investigate if this model (this is a model) can be used for the interpretation and analysis of my data on long-term agricultural development (yes, it can). The...

from Maria Alejandra Madi For instance, the growing quantity of legal proceedings pertaining to passivity on climate change represents a noteworthy advancement in the endeavour to safeguard the natural environment. The high-profile legal case known as the “Case of the Century” in France has garnered significant attention, as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have levied accusations against the French state for its perceived inadequate efforts in addressing climate change....

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism they are...

from Peter Radford And women in this more enlightened era. One of the great ironies of the last few decades is the ascendancy of “individualistic” thinking in  economic theory combined with the primacy of the “collective” we call the corporation in the real world.  The two offer highly contrasting explanations of how economic activity takes place.  The one is based upon relationships between individuals acting rationally and equipped with amounts of information — and, presumably, the...

Eurostat recently published new data on EU unemployment. The question: how is Southern Europe doing, after the Great Financial Crisis of 2009 when unemployment rates in Spain and Greece were above 20 and even 25%? Compared with the years directly after 2009 Spanish and Greek rates are down a lot, even when levels are still above 10%. But this is not all there is. Next to ‘normal’ unemployment, which is still at a crisis level, economic statisticians also define broad unemployment as...

from Lars Syll Many American undergraduates in Economics interested in doing a Ph.D. are surprised to learn that the first year of an Econ Ph.D. feels much more like entering a Ph.D. in solving mathematical models by hand than it does with learning economics. Typically, there is very little reading or writing involved, but loads and loads of fast algebra is required. Why is it like this? … One reason to use math is that it is easy to use math to trick people. Often, if you make your...

from Dean Baker Robert Reich posted a table that tells us a huge amount about the U.S. economy. CEO pay of the largest carmakers in the world Honda: $2.3M Nissan $4.5M Toyota: $6.7M BMW: $5.6M Mercedes: $7.5M Porsche: $7.9M Ford: $21M Stellantis: $25M GM: $29M The reason this table is so informative is that the performance of these foreign automakers would certainly stand up well in comparison to the U.S. Big Three. (In fairness, Stellantis is largely a European company, headquartered in...

from Peter Soderbaum Economists, like other people, are political economic persons guided by their ideological orientation. We are eager to become accepted in some social groups. Just as political parties often are afraid of departing too much from one another, an economist may prefer a comfortable life by positioning herself close to other economists with respect to conceptual framework and ideology. Accepting the norms and standards of neoclassical economics is rewarding and constitutes...