Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Our observations and theories are concept-dependent without therefore necessarily being concept-determined. There is a reality that exists independently of our knowledge and theories. Although we cannot comprehend it without using our concepts and theories, these are not the same as reality itself. Social science is relational. It studies and uncovers the social structures in which individuals participate and position themselves. It is these relations that have sufficient...

from Peter Söderbaum  Economists like other people are political economic persons guided by their ideological orientation. We are eager to become accepted in some social groups. Just as political parties often are afraid of departing too much from one another, an economist may prefer a comfortable life by positioning herself close to other economists with respect to conceptual framework and ideology. Accepting the norms and standards of neoclassical economics is rewarding and constitutes...

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...