Real-World Economics Review

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from Dean Baker The New York Times has an article on the Trump administration’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The first sentence wrongly describes the United States as “the world’s largest economy.” Actually China passed the United States as the world’s largest economy early in the decade. According to the I.M.F. its economy is now more than 25 percent larger than the U.S. economy. It is projected to be more than 50 percent larger by...

In 1980 the bottom 50% of the population in the US received 20% of the national income and 23% in Western Europe. By 2016 the share of the bottom 50% of the US population received declined to 13% while in Western Europe the bottom 50% held on to 22% of the national income. The top 1% in Western Europe increased their share to 12% in 2016. Meanwhile in the US the top 1%increased their share of the national income from 10% in 1980 to 20% in 2016. A key question is what policies and forces...

from Lars Syll Coupled with downright incompetence in statistics, we often find the syndrome that I have come to call statisticism: the notion that computing is synonymous with doing research, the naïve faith that statistics is a complete or sufficient basis for scientific methodology, the superstition that statistical formulas exist for evaluating such things as the relative merits of different substantive theories or the “importance” of  the causes of a “dependent variable”; and the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CO2_emissions_per_capita,_2017_(Our_World_in_Data).svg

from David Ruccio Across American universities, corporations, and financial institutions, researchers are honing computer models designed to predict the winner in the November 2020 presidential election in which Donald Trump will face a Democratic candidate still to be determined. One such set of models, developed by Moody’s Analytics, which focuses on the electoral college (and not the national popular vote), predicts a convincing victory for Trump. Moody’s based its projections on...

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 those...

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