Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker The New York Times seems to really love telling readers that China is facing a demographic crisis because its population is falling. It is not clear why the NYT thinks this amounts to a crisis for China, since many other countries have declining populations without experiencing any obvious crisis. The most obvious examples are two of China’s neighbors, Japan and Korea, both of which are seeing modest drops in population. In both countries, per capita income is continuing...

Please click here to support this open-access journal and the WEA RWER issue no. 105 download whole issue In Praise of Rebellion?Peter Radford2   Professor Stiglitz’s contributions to debates on intellectual propertyDean Baker 12   America’s trade deficits: blame U.S. policies – starting with tax lawsKenneth E. Austin 25   Extending the concept of inflation beyond consumer pricesMerijn Knibbe 46   History and origin of money in MMT and Austrian Economics:The difference methodology...

from Lars Syll Mainstream (neoclassical) economics has always put a strong emphasis on the positivist conception of the discipline, characterizing economists and their views as objective, unbiased, and non-ideological … Acknowledging that ideology resides quite comfortably in our economics departments would have huge intellectual implications, both theoretical and practical. In spite (or because?) of that, the matter has never been directly subjected to empirical scrutiny. In a recent...

from Peter Radford The machine makers are restless! There’s quite a debate going on about something called “techno-optimism” which roughly translates as anything technological is good and will, inevitably, make us all much better off.  That it makes fortunes for its owners is of secondary importance. The debate has emerged as a result of the publication of Marc Andreesen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, a strange and rather long paean to the many virtues of technology and the much more...

from Dean Baker Mark Twain famously quipped that everyone always talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it. (This was before global warming.) In the same vein, it is common for people to rant about billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, controlling major media outlets and using them to advance their political whims. But, no one seems to do anything about it. There is a reason for inaction. For the foreseeable future, it is hard to envision a political...

Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense; given that the primary problem is methodological, the issues seem to extend in different ways from...

from Blair Fix Economists are not known for their literary imaginations. Flip through any economics textbook and you’ll find a barrage of terms like the ‘Philips curve’ and the ‘Fisher effect’. The jargon is simple enough — empirical relations are usually named after the person who discovered them. But this convention is neither descriptive nor fun. The exception to this vanilla naming practice is a pattern called the ‘Great Gatsby curve’.1 It’s named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous...

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...