Real-World Economics Review

from Maria Alejandra Madi  Podcasts, which can now be easily accessed online, have had a recent surge in popularity, which may be attributed to their convenience. These podcasts discuss a wide range of topics that are related to the professional and academic spheres. The issue that naturally emerges is what exactly makes it qualified to be regarded as a scholarship approach. To put this another way, what exactly is it about this method that qualifies it to be used as an academic...

from Dean Baker The first decade of this century was pretty awful for U.S. manufacturing workers. In December of 1999 we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. This number had fallen to 11.5 million by December of 2009. This amounted to a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal. It’s also worth pointing out that most of these jobs were lost before the onset of the Great Recession. We...

from Lars Syll Justice is an ambiguous concept. We use it daily and constantly. But what is justice, really? What should be considered just? How do we measure justice? Is justice the same as equality and impartiality? And is there only one form of justice, or do different notions of justice coexist? These are important questions to try to shed light on and answer. Otherwise, the concept of justice risks becoming just one of many empty and abstract clichés we use to dress our own interests...

from Peter Radford This is how I explain what has happened to myself. Nobody should begin without warning.  So we ought jot down some initial observations that provide a starting point for what follows.  Some will become highly relevant.  Others will fade as we dig deeper into our subject and discover that they were not germane to the main theme.  They are in no particular order, since imposing order suggests a level of understanding unjustified by experience.  We simply do not know what...

from Dean Baker That line is effectively the conventional wisdom among people in policy circles. If that seems absurd, then you need to think more about how many politicians and intellectual types are approaching climate change. Just this week, John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, was in China. He was asking the Chinese government to move more quickly in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. President Xi told Kerry that China was not going to move forward its current target,...

from Asad Zaman and current issue of WEA Commentaries Ever since the spectacular failure of modern economic theory became obvious to all in the Global Financial Crisis, the search for alternative ways of organizing our economic affairs has intensified. The vast majority of alternatives under consideration offer minor tweaks and patches, remaining within the methodological framework of neoclassical economics. In contrast, Polanyi offers a radical alternative, with unique insights based on...

As nobody else bothers, I’m tinkering with designing a (badly needed) periodic table of prices. Look here and here. Economists are fond of ex post market prices – i.e. prices paid for actual transactions. But other kinds of prices abound. Administered prices, shadow prices, cost prices and more. Each of these prices are important and are used to influence the production and distribution of goods and services. Each of these are, separately, defined on all kind of webpages. but an...

from Junaid Jahangir and RWER issue 104 In terms of reviewing textbooks to teach economic inequality, three options are considered. First, the Mankiw, Kneebone, and McKenzie (2020) textbook, as I used it to teach microeconomics at the ECON 101 level. Second, the Ragan (2020) textbook, as it seems to be a bridge between neoclassical economics and perspectives found in options like the CORE text. Finally, the CORE textbook, which introduced a new module on teaching economic inequality in...

from Lars Syll Purchasing power parity doctrine is examined by sophisticated statistical and econometric techniques. The time series of aggregated price levels and the nominal exchange rates are treated as a random sample. Most papers of this type deal with the technical properties of the slightly different data sets. To take some examples (at random): “Two potential problems arise when working with nominal exchange rates and ratios of price levels. First, unit roots are possibly present...

from Marcello Spanò and RWER issue 104 Let us now turn to the signals of changes that are emerging with the war in Ukraine. The field of analysis regarding the relation of the war with the breakdown of unipolarism and its transformation into a multipolar world is certainly vast and complex. Here we limit the analysis some relevant aspects connected to the centrality of the dollar in the international monetary system. If we examine the 25-year period prior to 2014, we can...