Real-World Economics Review

Our Mission “Just wander into any economics or finance conference and the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming — women and minorities are few and far between.” – Business Insider, September 13th, 2017 We are a network of economists that aim to promote inclusiveness in economics, both in terms of academic content and in its institutional structures. We are working to promote an economics field free of discrimination, including sexism, racism, and discrimination based on approach and...

from Neva Goodwin Ecology teaches that everything is connected to everything else. Economics teaches that the market is a – some say the – great connector. Its specialty is to connect demand (what people want) to supply (what people produce), via prices. There are, of course, known problems in the use of prices as a society’s key connector. For one thing, those with more money have more of what is sometimes called “effective demand”; they can send louder, more effective signals to...

from Joachim H. Spangenberg and Lia Polotzek   Next to the inability to describe long-term developments and to take into account the structural uncertainty of complex systems, there is a more fundamental problem regarding current economic modelling manifesting itself in IAM/DSGE models. It consists of the fact that economic models are presented as being purely descriptive, while they actually carry quite some normative baggage. This becomes particularly relevant as the function of...

from Lars Syll A critique yours truly sometimes encounters is that as long as I cannot come up with some own alternative to the failing mainstream theory, I shouldn’t expect people to pay attention. This is, however, to totally and utterly misunderstand the role of philosophy and methodology of economics! As John Locke wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences,...

https://ourworldindata.org/incomes-across-the-distribution

from Lars Syll To achieve explanatory success, a theory should, minimally, satisfy two criteria: it should have determinate implications for behavior, and the implied behavior should be what we actually observe. These are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. Rational-choice theory often fails on both counts. The theory may be indeterminate, and people may be irrational. In what was perhaps the first sustained criticism of the theory, Keynes emphasized indeterminacy, notably because...

from Ken Zimmerman Human work/employment/work relations are complex. In terms of muscular or nervous effort there is no distinction between agreeable and irksome activities, or between those undertaken for pleasure and those undertaken for pay. In many instances severe physical labor, combined with hardship and exposure are undertaken for pleasure by tourists, who even hire and pay guides, for example mountain climbing. Similarly, athletic sports, though often arduous are both professions...

from Lars Syll So what do I mean by methodological arrogance? I mean an attitude that invokes micro-foundations as a methodological principle — philosophical reductionism in Popper’s terminology — while dismissing non-microfounded macromodels as unscientific. To be sure, the progress of science may enable us to reformulate (and perhaps improve) explanations of certain higher-level phenomena by expressing those relationships in terms of lower-level concepts. That is what Popper calls...

. . .  everything indicates more and more clearly that the resolution of the climate challenge can not be achieved without a powerful movement of compression of social inequalities, at all levels. With the current scale of inequalities, the march towards energetic sobriety will remain wishful thinking. Firstly because carbon emissions are highly concentrated among the richest. Globally, the richest 10% are responsible for almost half of the emissions, and the richest 1% alone emit more...