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Real-World Economics Review

Brazil, the Amazon, and Global Warming: It ain’t quite what the media tell you

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...

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Econometrics and the problem of unjustified assumptions

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...

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The U.S. economy is not the world’s largest

from Dean Baker I know that reality often has little place in our political debates, but is there any way we can the New York Times and other news outlets to stop saying that the U.S. economy is the world’s largest? It happens not to be true. According to the I.M.F., using purchasing power parity measures, which most economists view as the best measure, China passed the United States in 2015 and is now more than 25 percent larger. Maybe reporters and editors get a kick out of saying that...

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