Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Judea Pearl’s and Bryant Chen’s Regression and causation: a critical examination of six econometrics textbooks — published in Real-World Economics Review no. 65 — addresses two very important questions in the teaching of modern econometrics and its different textbooks — how is causality treated in general, and more specifically, to what extent they use a distinct causal notation. The authors have for years been part of an extended effort of advancing explicit causal...

from David Ruccio Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United...

Title                                                                                                                        Views Summary of the Great Transformation by Polanyi 50,877 Citigroup attempts to disappear its Plutonomy Report #2 42,171 Reflections on the “Inside Job” 21,729 25 graphics showing upward redistribution of income and wealth in USA since 1979 21,190 Emerging vs. developed countries’ GDP growth rates 1986 to 2015 20,221 Keen, Roubini and Baker win Revere Award...

from Lars Syll Causes can increase the probability​ of their effects; but they need not. And for the other way around: an increase in probability can be due to a causal connection; but lots of other things can be responsible as well … The connection between causes and probabilities is like the connection between a disease and one of its symptoms: The disease can cause the symptom, but it need not; and the same symptom can result from a great many different diseases … If you see a...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar Voices questioning the claim that nations and the majority of their people stand to gain from global trade are growing louder. The one difference now is that the leading protagonist of protectionism is not a developing country, but global hegemon United States under Donald Trump. Free trade benefits big corporations with production facilities abroad, Trump argues, while harming those looking for a decent livelihood working in America. With time Trump has made...

from Lars Syll Causes can increase the probability​ of their effects; but they need not. And for the other way around: an increase in probability can be due to a causal connection; but lots of other things can be responsible as well … The connection between causes and probabilities is like the connection between a disease and one of its symptoms: The disease can cause the symptom, but it need not; and the same symptom can result from a great many different diseases … If you see a...

from Peter Radford The key to understanding corporations is to separate the economics from everything else.  We need to do this because the economics, as expressed in various theories of the firm, are usually entirely idealized and bear no resemblance to reality.  Economists, as usual, love to theorize about things that don’t exist but which they wished did exist. But that may just be me being dismissively judgmental. Corporations, far from being products of the free market, are actually...

from Lars Syll The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather self-select into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social mechanisms that in different ways aggrieve them. Wage discrimination is unacceptable....

a WEA online conference15th October to 30th November, 2018 Discussion Forum SessionsVisit the Discussion Forum I. The Financialisation of the Economy Carmelo Ferlito, “The Malaysian Property Boom and Bust Cycle: History Repeating?” Jake Jennings, “The Crisis and the Asset Driven Household” Pushpangadan Mangari, “Impact of Financialization: View from India” Teodoro Dario Togati, “Financialization and the ‘New Normal’. At the Root of the Aggregate Demand Problem Undermining New...

from David Ruccio No, the stock market is not predictable. And no one knows the exact causes of last week’s carnage on Wall Street—with the Dow down 4.2 percent, the S&P 4.1 percent and the Nasdaq 3.7 percent, representing their worst weekly performances since March. But the precipitous fall in all major indices, which many analysts blamed at least in part on the earnings blackout period, did serve to highlight one of the factors that has been driving the bull market: corporations...