Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll The treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe — nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe … The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues … Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the states whose destiny...

from Dean Baker One of the Trump administration’s talking points about global warming is that we’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while the countries that remain in the Paris accord are not. Well, the first part of this story is clearly not true, as data for 2018 show a large rise in emissions for the United States. The second part is also not very accurate, as most other countries are taking large steps to reduce emissions. At the top of the list is China. The country has undertaken...

from Dean Baker With the New Year and the US recovery soon to be record-breaking in duration, many are asking when the next recession is likely to come and what will cause it. While none of us has a crystal ball that gives a clear view of the future, there are a few things we can say. First, and most importantly, the next recession will not look like the last recession. The last recession was caused by the collapse of a massive housing bubble that had been the driving force in the...

from Asad Zaman This post is the third part of lecture 8 of Advanced Macro L08C: Fisher’s Debt-Deflation Theory of the Great Depression. In previous segments of this lecture L08A: Micro-Foundations for Keynesian Economics, and L08B: Keynesian Explanation for Great Depression: Seriously Incomplete, we examined the Keynesian explanation for the Great Depression, and found serious deficiencies in it. L08A explains that many different kinds of outcomes, with and without unemployment, are...

from Lars Syll Alex Rosenberg — chair of the philosophy department at Duke University and renowned economic methodologist — has an interesting article on What’s Wrong with Paul Krugman’s Philosophy of Economics in 3:AM Magazine. Writes Rosenberg: Krugman writes: “So how do you do useful economics? In general, what we really do is combine maximization-and-equilibrium as a first cut with a variety of ad hoc modifications reflecting what seem to be empirical regularities about how both...

from Trond Andresen, Steve Keen and Marco Cattaneo and the current issue of WEA Commentaries A new means of payment can be part of the solution for the eurozone’s unemployed. We have now seen nine years of social crisis and huge unemployment in many euro countries. An entire youth generation has barely experienced anything but being out of work. Still no solution has been found or implemented. The time is overdue to think outside the box. We propose a solution that has circulated...

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism they are...

from W. Milberg and the current issue of the RWER With the Trump tax cuts of 2017, the disconnect in popular discourse between government spending and taxing became more or less complete. Rate (and revenue) cuts were considered politically appealing, independent of any imagined social goal that might require public financing. It constituted an end to the debate over the government spending required to attain social goals and the analysis of the tax rates and regulations needed to finance...