Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Unless enforced by study design and execution, statistical assumptions usually have no external justification; they may even be quite implausible. As result, one often sees attempts to justify specific assumptions with statistical tests, in the belief that a high p-value or ‘‘nonsignificance’’ licenses the assumption and a low p-value refutes it. Such focused testing is based on a meta-assumption that every other assumption used to derive the p-value is correct, which is a...

from David Ruccio The same day I wrote that capitalism was coming apart at the seams, indicated by the shocking disparity between the compensation of corporate CEOs and workers, the Business Roundtable published its new statement of purpose of a corporation.* The 180 or so corporate executives who signed the statement declared that all their stakeholders, not just owners of equity shares, were important to their mission. Many business pundits, such as Andrew Ross Sorkin, greeted the new...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Over the past 139 years, the total return on U.S. equities (capital appreciation plus reinvested dividends) grew 905 times faster than the manufacturing wage rate.

from Dean Baker Brazil has gotten a huge amount of bad press with the fires in the Amazon with the emphasis on the harm its development policies are doing to efforts to limit global warming. While the policies of Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, are disastrous, there is an important part of the story that is being left out of most discussions. The reason that we are worried about global warming is because rich countries, most importantly the United States, have been spewing...

Mr Eddie Dean Baker

Mr Eddie Dean Baker

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from Lars Syll There seems to be a pervasive human aversion to uncertainty, and one way to reduce feelings of uncertainty is to invest faith in deduction as a sufficient guide to truth. Unfortunately, such faith is as logically unjustified as any religious creed, since a deduction produces certainty about the real world only when its assumptions about the real world are certain … Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to...