Real-World Economics Review

Economic Thought:History, Philosophy and Methodology Vol. 8, No. 1 download issue in full Judging Heterodox Economics: A Response to Hodgson’s CriticismsLynne Chester The Meaning and Future of Heterodox Economics: A Response to Lynne ChesterGeoffrey M. Hodgson Was Smith A Moral Subjectivist?Kevin Quinn Addressing the Malaise in Neoclassical Economics: A Call for Partial ModelsRon Wallace Commentary on ‘Addressing the Malaise in Neoclassical Economics: A Call for Partial Models’David...

from Lars Syll How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, ​Richard Feynman, was telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory development and model modification. In mainstream economic theory,​ preferences are standardly expressed in the form of a utility...

from Ken Zimmerman Ecosocialists aren’t even a political party, much less a political force in most of the western world. And certainly not in the top polluting nations in the world – China, Russia, India, and the USA. These four nations along with the EU hold the future of humans safely living on planet earth, of perhaps not living at all on that planet. There are two ways to approach changing this situation – from people’s direct-action groups to local and then national governments....

from Lars Syll [embedded content] Now, I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country … Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights—they didn’t have a settled...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump has repeatedly proclaimed his love for tariffs, even dubbing himself “Tariff Man.” While Trump clearly does not understand how tariffs work, some of the discussion in the media has been off target as well. It’s worth trying to get the basic story straight. First, it has been widely pointed out that Trump is wrong in thinking that China or other targeted countries are paying tariffs to the U.S. Treasury. To make it simple, a tariff is a tax on imports. It can...

from June Sekera More than a century ago, the effective operation of the public economy was a significant, active concern of economists. With the insurgence of market-centrism and rational choice economics, however, government was devalued, its role circumscribed and seen from a perspective of “market failure.” As Backhouse (2005) has shown, the transformation in economic thinking in the latter half of the 20th century led to a “radical shift” in worldview regarding the role of the state....

from Lars Syll Now we come to the core of Wolf’s objection. It is, as he admits, political. And it is that politicians might use their judgements. Heaven forbid! Wolf is very clearly of the school that created economics to impose constraint on that judgement so that full employment, rising real wages and a redistribution from capital to labour may not happen. And now he is petrified that the so-called economics that underpinned that heinous political system is shown to be wrong the...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh World trade is in deceleration mode. After having recovered smartly from 2.3 and 1.6 per cent in 2015 and 2016 to 4.6 per cent in 2017, the growth in the volume of world merchandise trade slowed to 3.0 per cent in 2018, WTO estimates show (Chart 1).   The deceleration has been greater in recent quarters. Quarter-on-quarter growth rates, as estimated by the Netherlands Centraal Planbureau (CPB) indicate that trade growth fell from 1.1 per cent in...

from Mark Weisbrot Donald Trump won the presidency–despite losing the popular vote by 2.8 million—with a campaign that careened wildly from one distraction to another. He has clung to this as a Twitter and governing strategy ever since. As there are 190 countries in the world, and the United States trades with most of them, trade wars so far have provided a shovel-ready supply of such diversions. So, here we are: Last Thursday, just in time to distract from the more potentially violent...

from Lars Syll Paul Krugman wonders why no one listens to academic economists … One answer is that economists don’t listen to themselves. More precisely, liberal economists like Krugman who want the state to take a more active role in managing the economy, continue to teach an economic theory that has no place for activist policy. Let me give a concrete example. One of Krugman’s bugaboos is the persistence of claims that expansionary monetary policy must lead to higher inflation … But...