Real-World Economics Review

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,...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. To simply assume that economic processes are ergodic and concentrate on ensemble averages — and hence in any relevant sense timeless — is not a sensible way for dealing with the kind of genuine uncertainty that permeates real-world economies. Ergodicity and the all-important difference between time averages and ensemble averages are difficult concepts — so let me try to explain the meaning of these...

from Asad Zaman During the last two semesters, I taught Macroeconomics based on a new approach which re-incorporate the history that Economists forgot (See  Method or Madness?). The central idea of the course is that economic theories cannot be understood outside of their historical context. Conversely, economic history cannot be understood except by studying the economic theories (right or wrong) which were used by contemporaries to shape policy responses to historical events. The...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar Facebook has launched a process that would lead to the creation of a new cryptocurrency, “Libra”, in the first half of 2020. Named after a unit of weight used in ancient Rome, Facebook hopes Libra would become the dominant measure of value for transactions, at least on the internet. As is characteristic of the world of digital business that, outside of finance, has delivered the largest number of billionaires in recent decades, the creation of libra is presented...