Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Although I never believed it when I was young and held scholars in great respect, it does seem to be the case that ideology plays a large role in economics. How else to explain Chicago’s acceptance of not only general equilibrium but a particularly simplified version of it as ‘true’ or as a good enough approximation to the truth? Or how to explain the belief that the only correct models are linear and that the von Neuman prices are those to which actual prices converge...

from Lars Syll [embedded content]

from Dean Baker The April jobs report was, for the most part, pretty good news. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, a level not seen in almost 50 years. The survey of businesses showed the economy generated more than 260,000 new jobs in the month — a very strong pace of job growth. While not great, the average hourly wage grew 3.2 percent. That is more than a percentage point above the 2 percent inflation rate, meaning that wages are at least rising faster than prices, and...

from Ken Zimmerman After the cognitive revolution, Sapiens invented questioning and then questions. And Sapiens questioned everything. What happens next? Why did this happen rather than something else? Will each human die, when, and why? Who invented humans? Why were humans invented? What are the answers? One of the answers humans invented to deal with this and similar questions is randomness. Other inventions to deal with Sapiens’ questioning are chance, mathematics, and probability....

Income gini coefficient map according to The World Bank (2014)

Let’s not forget that she once played a union worker, in ‘The pajama game’. With the song ‘racing with the clock‘. Also, here a blogpost of mine about how in ‘The Age of Doris Day’ apt new institutions enabled everybody to work less and have better lives, in stead of a part of the population being entirely unemployed and miserable.

We continue our series of discussions about Modern Money Theory and funding the Green New Deal with host Paul Jay Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

We continue our series of discussions about Modern Money Theory and funding the Green New Deal with host Paul Jay Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

from Lars Syll Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing … If there is such a thing as “original sin” in economic methodology, it is the worship of the idol of the mathematical rigour invented by Arrow and...