Real-World Economics Review

Sources: Credit Suisse (aggregating data from national records) Last updated: May 12, 2016

from Ken Zimmerman Bichler and Nitzan get into the details of how “capitalization” is used to deny climate change in their article, ”How to use capitalization to minimize the cost of climate change and win a Nobel for ‘sustainable growth.’” The title says it all. William D. Nordhaus won the Nobel prize in economics for a climate model that minimized the cost of rising global temperatures and undermined the need for urgent action. Nordhaus’ “racket” created low-ball estimates of the costs...

from Peter Radford I have been reading Walter Scheidel’s wonderful book “The Great Leveler”, which gives us a very long period perspective on inequality.  Were I to be limited to only two books on inequality, this would be one.  It covers the ebb and flow of inequality over an extremely long time, with extensive discussions on civilizations as diverse as ancient China and ancient Rome.  Anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to the understanding of inequality has to be familiar...

Volume 9, Issue No. 1 Download the issue as a PDF        Karl Polanyi and social justice     Maria Alejandra Madi What can economics learn from medicine     Peter Swan How monetary union is sacrificed on the alter of competitiveness    Norbert Häring The Demise of Neoliberalism in Mexico today: if so, so what?      Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid               Please support the WEA by paying a membership fee   or making a small donation

conceived by Jason Hickel   visualization by Huzaifa Zoomkawala

from Michael Hudson What is even more remarkable is the idea that economic assumptions need not have any relationship to reality at all. This attitude is largely responsible for having turned economics into a mock-science, and explains its rather odd use of mathematics. Typical of the modern attitude is the textbook Microeconomics (1964:5) by William Vickery, long-time chairman of Columbia University’s economics department, 1992-93 president of the American Economic Association and winner...

from Asad Zaman Published in Dawn, Mar 27, 2019, a leading Pakistani newspaper, in context of public debate about moving to a floating exchange rate regime — In 1971, when Nixon shocked the world by abandoning the convertibility of dollars to gold, he dragged all of us, unwillingly, into the modern era of floating exchange rates. Since then, economic theories have changed. But old habits die hard; economists and policymakers today continue to think and operate as if they live in the old...

Sources: Credit Suisse (aggregating data from national records) Last updated: May 12, 2016

from Lars Syll Between 1920 and 1950, a debate took place which defined the future of economics in the second half of the 20th century. On one side were John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight; on the other, Frank Ramsey and Jimmie Savage. Knight and Keynes believed in the ubiquity of “radical uncertainty”. Not only did we not know what was going to happen, we had a very limited ability to even describe the things that might happen. They distinguished risk, which could be described with the...

from Peter Radford Let’s start with a different approach: Reality suggests there are many ways in which resources are allocated within an economy, not just one.  Economics, as it now exists in its mainstream or standard form, has withered to study just one: that which takes place in markets — where markets are strictly defined in such a way as to guarantee outcomes compatible with a certain ideological perspective.  As we have discussed before this trajectory for the discipline was deemed...