Real-World Economics Review

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from Maria Alejandra Madi Looking back, after the Second World War, new theoretical and applied work in economics fostered empirical techniques that included structural estimation, the development of input-output methods and linear programming. Among the theoretical advances, the Keynesian revolution, the mathematical modeling of the business cycle, game theory, dynamic modeling, new models of consumer behavior and general equilibrium analysis can be highlighted. What is significant about...

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from Lars Syll According to one of the most widely used textbooks on mainstream theories of economic growth, one can for the United States “calculate labor’s share of GDP by looking at wage and salary payments and compensation for the self-employed as a share of GDP. These calculations reveal that the labor share has been relatively constant over time, at a value of around 0.7.” But is this “classic stylized fact” — that the labour share is relatively constant over time at around...

from Peter Radford I am not quite sure what to make of the phrase “radical uncertainty”.  It pops up in most discussions of Keynes as being a critical, if not the critical, point of departure of his thinking from the silliness we know as classical economics. Is radical uncertainty a redundant statement?  If something is uncertain, what is it that can make it radically so?  Surely the whole point of uncertainty is that we have no idea just how radical that lack of knowledge may be.  Worse,...

from Lars Syll Economists are struggling to explain recent productivity developments, the implications of rising inequality, the impact of persistently negative interest rates in the eurozone … and the sudden slowdown in European growth … None of this is a huge surprise, given the profession’s embrace of simplistic theoretical assumptions and excessive reliance on mathematical techniques that prize elegance over real-world applicability … All of this should tell economists that there is...

from Asad Zaman Guest Post by Donni Wang [author details at bottom of post]. Republished from The Economic Historian blog: “No Go from the Get Go: Adam Smith’s Bad History, Lessons from Ancient Greece, and the Need to Subsume Economics” – She is a historian, and argues here that a false history which portrays progression and progress actually seals off alternatives and choices which we could, and indeed need to, make today. Correcting Adam Smith’s views about history of mankind, using...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan This week, with the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta anticipating sharply lower GDP growth for 2019:Q1, President Trump presented a ‘Budget for A Better America’, calling for a smaller government and a bigger military. Forty years ago, the very same call was hailed as the best recipe for renewed growth. The U.S. ruling class was getting ready to install Ronald Reagan as President, abandon the Cold War and embark on neoliberalism,...

from Lars Syll In the realm of science it ought to be considered of little or no value to simply make claims about the model and lose sight of reality. There is a difference between having evidence for some hypothesis and having evidence for the hypothesis relevant for a given purpose. The difference is important because scientific methods tend to be good at addressing hypotheses of a certain kind and not others: scientific methods come with particular applications built into them … The...