Real-World Economics Review

from Gerald Holtham Econometrics like more casual empiricism can be done well or badly, intelligently or stupidly, dogmatically or with an open mind. But are these gentlemen saying that statistical analysis can never reveal anything in economics that is not obvious to simple observation? Evidently that is untrue. What is revealed is never a “law” and will obviously be contingent in space and time. That follows from the nature of society and economic data. Statistical analysis nevertheless...

from Blair Fix, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler    But there is a slight conceptual problem. It turns out that the growth of real GDP – ostensibly a single, objective quantity – is highly sensitive to our choice of base year. To illustrate, consider a hypothetical economy that produces only two commodities: 1,000 lb of tomatoes and two laptops. Next, let’s choose 1990 as our base year and assume that tomatoes in that year cost $2/lb while a laptop costs $2,000. In this case, real...

from Lars Syll A modern economy is a very complicated system. Since we cannot conduct controlled experiments on its smaller parts, or even observe them in isolation, the classical hard-science devices for discriminating between competing hypotheses are closed to us. The main alternative device is the statistical analysis of historical time-series. But then another difficulty arises. The competing hypotheses are themselves complex and subtle. We know before we start that all of them, or at...

from Ikonoclast I guess history shows that moral wrongs can continue almost indefinitely. However, being empirically (provably scientifically wrong to a high degree of probability) is another beast altogether. Trends that can’t continue because they approach limits imposed by fundamental laws of nature, won’t continue. It’s as simple as that. We have to change our ways (patterns of production, consumption and attempted endless growth) or civilization will crash and burn, pretty much...

from Jayati Ghosh Inequality has increased since it caught the attention of the international community. The claims that global inequality has decreased because of the faster rise in per capita incomes in populous countries like China and India must be tempered by several considerations. National policies are crucial in this worsening state of affairs and the international economic architecture and associated patterns of trade and capital flows encourage such policies. More national...

from Lars Syll All social sciences, to a greater or lesser degree, start with a yearning for a universal language, into which they can fit such particulars as suit their view of things. Their model of knowledge thus aspires to the precision and generality of the natural sciences. Once we understand human behavior in terms of some universal and – crucially – ahistorical principle, we can aspire to control (and of course improve) it. No social science has succumbed to this temptation more...

from Dean Baker The New York Times told us last week that China is running out of people. That might seem an odd concern for a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, but you can read it for yourself: “Driving this regression in women’s status is a looming aging crisis, and the relaxing of the draconian ‘one-child’ birth restrictions that contributed to the graying population. The Communist Party now wants to try to stimulate a baby boom.” What exactly is supposed to be...

from Lars Syll The unpopularity of the principle of organic unities shows very clearly how great is the danger of the assumption of unproved additive formulas. The fallacy, of which ignorance of organic unity is a particular instance, may perhaps be mathematically represented thus: suppose f(x) is the goodness of x and f(y) is the goodness of y. It is then assumed that the goodness of x and y together is f(x) + f(y) when it is clearly f(x + y) and only in special cases will it be true...

from Joseph Huber  Impaired ability of banks to lend and invest?  One of the concerns that have been expressed about the introduction of digital currency (DC) is that with a growing share of DC “deposit-funded bank credit might be undermined” and that “with too widespread a DC, it might threaten the banks’ lending activity, if banks cannot use deposits for that purpose”. Such statements are totally missing the point. Under fractional reserve banking, deposits are not loanable funds for...

from Ikonoclast The methodological ideology of conventional economics will be destroyed by its failure in the current and ongoing collisions of its recommendations and applications with real systems. This is already happening as Herman Daly illustrates in his paper “Growthism: Its Ecological, Economic and Ethical Limits.” In turn economics, like science, will progress theoretically and methodologically, or else disappear with humans themselves, “one funeral at a time” as not only current...