Real-World Economics Review

from Joseph Huber People have become used to hearing about digital currencies (DC) such as Bitcoin. These currencies are based on new technology known as distributed ledger and blockchain technology and are also referred to as cryptocurrencies because of the data encryption involved. Cryptocurrencies represent a radical alternative to the current banking system, in that they bypass retail banks and defy central-bank control from the outset. Against this background, central banks are now...

from Lars Syll Economic models frequently invoke … entities that do not exist, such as perfectly rational agents, perfectly inelastic demand functions, and so on. As economists often defensively point out, other sciences too invoke non-existent entities, such as the frictionless planes of high-school physics. But there is a crucial difference: the false-ontology models of physics and other sciences are empirically constrained. If a physics model leads to successful predictions and...

from Salim Rashid It is plausible that economics slipped into its current difficulty because all earlier theory was framed with agriculture in mind. But we are not in an agricultural world anymore. The number of available products must have expanded a 1000-fold since the 1700s. Unless one looks, it is difficult to grasp the sheer amounts of data that are generated and potentially available – but perhaps impossible to digest because of their magnitude and complexity. Below are two...

from Imad Moosa Econometrics is no longer about measurement in economics as it has become too abstract. The word “econometrics” is typically stretched to cover mathematical economics and the word “econometrician” refers to an economist, or otherwise, who is skilled and interested in the application of mathematics, be it mathematical statistics, game theory, topology or measure theory. Baltagi (2002) argues that research in economics and econometrics has been growing more and more abstract...

from Lars Syll Econometrics looks “sciency”. Once in a seminar presentation I displayed two equations, one taken from Econometrica and the other from the Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and challenged the audience to tell me which is which. No one volunteered to tell me which is which, including at least one hard-core econometrician. Economics is a social science where the behaviour of decision makers is not governed purely by economic considerations but also by social...

real-world economics review​​​​​​​Please click here to support this open-access journal and the WEASubscribers: 26,499     subscribe      RWER Blog      ISSN 1755-9472 A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,432 members, join ​​​​​​​back issuesIssue no. 88  ​​​​​​​10 July 2019download whole issue Make-believe empiricism Is econometrics relevant to real world economics?Imad A. Moosa          download  The fiction of verifiability in economic “science”Salim Rashid         ...

from Ken Zimmerman There is no separation between culture and economy. They are one another. Historian Richard Hofstadter notes, as have many others that American culture is “…diverse and contradictory” … “visionary and down-to-earth, deeply radical and solidly conservative, coldly prudent and· unexpectedly wild.” As American culture changes, so does American economy. America is Puritanism with its omnipotent God, souls predestined to heaven or hell before birth, and certainty that...

from Lars Syll Paul Samuelson claimed that the ‘ergodic hypothesis’ is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume that ergodicity is essential to economics? The answer can only be — as I have argued here here here here and here — NO WAY! Obviously yours truly is far from the only researcher being critical of Paul Samuelson. This is what Ole Peters writes in a highly interesting article on Samuelson’s stance on...

from Jason Hickel Imagine if we were to even just partially decommoditize London’s housing stock; for example, imagine the government was to cap the price of housing at half its present level. Prices would still be outrageously high, but Londoners would suddenly be able to work and earn significantly less than they presently do without any loss to their quality of life. Indeed, they would gain in terms of time they could spend with their friends and family, doing things they love,...

from Ken Zimmerman Robert Reich suggests that one thing we could do to deal with these problems is to abolish billionaires. Robert, lays out the ways billionaires are able to accumulate that much money. First, monopoly. We can address this by vigorously enforcing anti-trust laws already on the books. Second, copyrights and patents. Robert suggests shortening these by half or more. Third, insider information. Here we need to both enforce fines to take away all the money gotten in this way,...