Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker Workers in the United States now put in more time than workers in any other wealthy country, including Japan. This week New York’s city council will begin to consider a measure put forward by Mayor Bill de Blasio that would guarantee workers in the city at least 10 days of paid time off per year. This proposal is an important step toward bringing the United States inline with the other rich countries in guaranteeing its workers some amount of paid vacation. As a new report...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] If anything, Gelman’s talk underlines how important it is not to equate science with statistical calculation. All science entail human judgement, and using statistical models doesn’t relieve us of that necessity. Working with misspecified models, the scientific value of statistics is actually zero — even though you’re making valid statistical inferences! Statistical models are no substitutes for doing real science. Or as a famous German philosopher...

from Malgorzata Dereniowska Environmental ethics is a field of applied ethics concerned with the ethical dimension of human relationship towards nature. The term environmental ethics covers a variety of approaches that can be roughly divided into two camps: anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism refers to a human-centered approach to environmental problems that protects nature for humans. Radical anthropocentrism is often equated with the view that only human beings...

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...

Join the Conversation with Dean Baker and MPH Assistant Professor Laura Chyu as a part of the International Day of Action for Women's Health celebrations.

Join the Conversation with Dean Baker and MPH Assistant Professor Laura Chyu as a part of the International Day of Action for Women's Health celebrations.

from Max Koch Herman Daly’s “steady-state economy” (Daly, 1974) is the most cited case of an economic system that functions within ecological boundaries. It is a model of an economy that does not grow in the sense that it keeps the level of throughput (extraction of raw materials from nature and their return to nature as waste) as low as possible and ideally within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem. However, the original concept of a steady-state economy was...

from Richard Smith We ecosocialists have a practical answer. We accept the science that to prevent runaway global warming “greenhouse emission must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050.” We agree with the IPCC that this will require “deep emissions reductions in all sectors.” We agree that it will require “far-reaching transitions in energy, land, infrastructure, and manufacturing,” that it will require “systems transitions” (indeed, more than they...

from Lars Syll Thad Dunning’s book Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences is a very useful guide for social scientists interested in research methodology in general and natural experiments in specific. Dunning argues that since random or as-if random assignment in natural experiments obviates the need for controlling potential confounders, this kind of “simple and transparent” design-based research method is preferable to more traditional multivariate regression analysis where the...

from Dean Baker I write about the possibility of producing drugs without patent monopolies frequently for several reasons. First, drugs can be essential for people’s health or even life. It should not be a struggle for people to pay for them. Second, there is a huge amount of money at stake, way more than in almost any other realm of public policy. Third, it is such a great example where government intervention, in the form of patents and related monopolies, creates the problem. This is...