Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll [embedded content]

from Dean Baker The April jobs report was, for the most part, pretty good news. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, a level not seen in almost 50 years. The survey of businesses showed the economy generated more than 260,000 new jobs in the month — a very strong pace of job growth. While not great, the average hourly wage grew 3.2 percent. That is more than a percentage point above the 2 percent inflation rate, meaning that wages are at least rising faster than prices, and...

from Ken Zimmerman After the cognitive revolution, Sapiens invented questioning and then questions. And Sapiens questioned everything. What happens next? Why did this happen rather than something else? Will each human die, when, and why? Who invented humans? Why were humans invented? What are the answers? One of the answers humans invented to deal with this and similar questions is randomness. Other inventions to deal with Sapiens’ questioning are chance, mathematics, and probability....

Income gini coefficient map according to The World Bank (2014)

Let’s not forget that she once played a union worker, in ‘The pajama game’. With the song ‘racing with the clock‘. Also, here a blogpost of mine about how in ‘The Age of Doris Day’ apt new institutions enabled everybody to work less and have better lives, in stead of a part of the population being entirely unemployed and miserable.

We continue our series of discussions about Modern Money Theory and funding the Green New Deal with host Paul Jay Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

We continue our series of discussions about Modern Money Theory and funding the Green New Deal with host Paul Jay Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

from Lars Syll Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing … If there is such a thing as “original sin” in economic methodology, it is the worship of the idol of the mathematical rigour invented by Arrow and...

from David Richardson There have been numerous postings on this blog that go the problems associated with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Most of these posts have questioned their use in the hands of the high priests of the orthodox economics profession. For example, Lars Syll has said “DSGE models are simply — from both empirical and methodological points of view — not suited for understanding modern monetary economies” (28 Nov 2018). I have no argument at all with this...

from Steve Keen Thomas Kuhn once famously described textbooks as the vehicle by which students learn how to do “normal science” in an academic discipline. Economic textbooks clearly fulfil this function, but the pity is that what passes for “normal” in economics barely deserves the appellation “science”. Most introductory economics textbooks present a sanitised, uncritical rendition of  conventional economic theory, and the courses in which these textbooks are used do little to counter...