Real-World Economics Review

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from Peter Radford The following is part of a correspondence I had recently with a friend here in Vermont: The purpose of increasing taxes on the wealthy is twofold: one is to raise revenue; the other is to prevent growing concentration of wealth.  I think the second of the two is the more important.  The American system of opportunity and so on was founded on society being more equal than it is [not equal, but more equal].  As wealth gets entrenched further each decade inequality erodes...

from David Ruccio   How else to put it? The levels of economic inequality in the United States are obscene.  According to the latest data from the World Inequality Database, the share of pre-tax income captured by the top 1 percent of Americans is an astounding 20.1 percent, while the bottom 50 percent are forced to make due with only 12.6 percent. And the distribution of wealth is even more unequal: the top 1 percent own 37.2 percent but the bottom 50 percent of Americans hold no net...

from Lars Syll Traditionally, philosophers have focused mostly on the logical template of inference. The paradigm-case has been deductive inference, which is topic-neutral and context-insensitive. The study of deductive rules has engendered the search for the Holy Grail: syntactic and topic-neutral accounts of all prima facie reasonable inferential rules. The search has hoped to find rules that are transparent and algorithmic, and whose following will just be a matter of grasping their...

source: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2015/02/gold%20standard%20inequality_0.jpg

from Lars Syll If we wanted highly probable claims, scientists would stick to​​ low-level observables and not seek generalizations, much less theories with high explanatory content. In this day​ of fascination with Big data’s ability to predict​ what book I’ll buy next, a healthy Popperian reminder is due: humans also want to understand and to explain. We want bold ‘improbable’ theories. I’m a little puzzled when I hear leading machine learners praise Popper, a realist, while proclaiming...

from Dean Baker In Washington policy circles, being a supporter of free trade is pretty much comparable to saying you believe in evolution. All reasonable people say they accept the doctrine and agree that tariffs and other forms of protectionism are evil and dirty. While there are good arguments for free trade as an economic policy, in the real world what passes for “free trade” is pretty much any policy that redistributes income upward, even if it is directly at odds with free trade. I...

Although this post was published on this blog over five years ago, it continues to be downloaded a thousand times a month.  (editor) from Asad Zaman An earlier post by Mady provided an introduction to Polanyi’s classic work The Great Transformation. This book is crucial to understanding both HOW and WHY we need to re-structure economic education today. Unfortunately, the book is quite complex, a bit dry and technical at times, and consequently hard to follow. Although many leading...

from Lars Syll The balanced budget paradox is probably one of the most devastating phenomena haunting our modern economies. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed politicians and economists recommend as “the sole solution.” One of the most...

from Lars Syll