Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford Just a brief follow-on to my recent comments on the role of economics and its relationship with power and/or politics. I pulled out my old copy of Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” to refresh my memory of his position on the topic.  Recall that he talked about the way in which economic activity is embedded within the larger social and political fabric.  Mainstream economists must shudder at such a thought.  Isn’t economics superior and more “scientific” than...

from Ken Zimmerman Again, history can teach us. Looking back to the post-World War I period, the soul-searchingly pejorative “merchants of death” rhetoric was in vogue. One of the most outspoken critics of war profiteering was Marine Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had spent his 34-year career in uniform dutifully fighting various colonial wars at the turn of the 20th century. His highly publicized 1935 speech/short book “War is a...

from Lars Syll A couple of years ago — when visiting one of Helsinki’s many nice cafés and restaurants — yours truly read the following inscription on a mirror and thought Keynes must have been here … Anyhow — slides from yours truly’s keynote presentation at the Kalevi Sorsa Foundation celebration of the 80th anniversary of Keynes’ General Theory is available here.

from Ikonoclast When we are dealing with physical phenomena, the fundamental laws of the cosmos are independent of human understanding or modelling of them. No matter what you or I or any human thinks of the Laws of Thermodynamics or even whether we are ignorant of them, the fundamental phenomena follow a course which can be well modeled by those laws when those laws are mathematicized to permit accurate descriptions and empirically verifiable predictions. However, when it comes to...

from Lars Syll Spending the morning going through Francine Blau’s and Lawrence Kahn’s JEL survey of modern research on the gender wage gap, yours truly was struck almost immediately how little that research really has accomplished in terms of explaining gender wage discrimination. With all the heavy regression and econometric alchemy used, wage discrimination is somehow more or less conjured away … Trying to reduce the risk of having established only ‘spurious relations’ when dealing with...

from Peter Radford What am I supposed to make of the Scheidel book? Having waded through it I emerge with a grim pessimism — certainly more than when I started. The basic thesis, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is that periods of relatively greater equality are rare in history and that they ebb away soon after the re-establishment of elite control over the distribution of national resources.  Worse, the relative equality that is then undone was only the result of some disastrous...

from Peter Söderbaum  Present accounting systems at the national and organizational level are closely connected with neoclassical economics. The main parameter in national accounting is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Other macroeconomic indicators are consumption, investments, exports, imports. These variables are all monetary in kind. But as has (hopefully) been made clear, present threats to mankind are as much, if not more, of a non-monetary kind. Today “sustainable development” has...

from Lars Syll Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion – thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism...

from Ken Zimmerman Inequality in human societies has always existed. When it become extreme (that point varies by society and historical circumstances) the society either collapses completely (e.g., revolution, war, failure of basic services, famine) or undergoes changes in its basic framework. Ancient Rome, for example, nearly collapsed when corruption in government and economics (particularly appalling poverty) combined with refusal of its citizens (particularly the wealthy) to put...

from Asad Zaman Global experience shows that market economies create massive inequalities, enriching the top one per cent, while leaving the bottom of the population far behind. One key to prosperity is to provide productive jobs for all who would like to participate in the production process. Unfortu­nately, contemporary macroeconomics, which was blind to the possibility of the global financial crisis, is not equipped with the ideas and tools required to create full employment....