Real-World Economics Review

from Blair Fix Like many Canadians, I grew up with a faith in meritocracy. Do your best, I believed, and the world would reward you. In school, this idea seemed self-evidently true. I worked hard, and was rewarded with good grades and praise from teachers. And those students who didn’t get good grades? Well they had less skill — less merit — than me. Or so I thought. In hindsight, I cringe at my naivety. Like many successful people, I was blind to something important. There is no...

from Lars Syll The neoliberal utopia evokes powerful belief – the free trade faith – not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of...

from Lars Syll An ongoing concern is that excessive focus on formal modeling and statistics can lead to neglect of practical issues and to overconfidence in formal results … Analysis interpretation depends on contextual judgments about how reality is to be mapped onto the model, and how the formal analysis results are to be mapped back into reality. But overconfidence in formal outputs is only to be expected when much labor has gone into deductive reasoning. First, there is a need to feel...

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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...