Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Thirty years ago yours truly wrote an article on revealed preference theory that got published in History of Political Economy (no. 25, 1993). Paul Samuelson wrote a kind letter and informed me that he was the one who had recommended it for publication. But although he liked it a lot, he also wrote a comment — published in the same volume of HOPE — saying: Between 1938 and 1947, and since then as Pålsson Syll points out, I have been scrupulously careful not to claim for...

from Jesper Jespersen Personal recollection How I met Vicky I was on a one year sabbatical leave at Cambridge University, King’s College by invitation of Professor Wynne Godley in the year 1988/89. Seriously speaking I was surprised, because except for Godley there were only few economists left at the Faculty, who called him-/herself Keynesian. The old guard of Keynes’ disciples had disappeared: Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor were no longer alive; Richard Kahn very fragile....

from Dean Baker We should be able to work together for the benefit of humanity. John Kerry got the start to his political career when he testified to Congress about the Vietnam War as an anti-war veteran, and asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” The point, of course, was that we were still sending soldiers to Vietnam to fight and risk dying in a war that was widely recognized to be pointless. Rather than just owning up to the mistake, we continued the...

from Norbert Häring India’s central bank will withdraw the largest banknote from circulation. The then largest note is only worth about as much as the smallest in the euro area. The move is intended to force people to use electronic money instead of cash. With this, they can be better monitored and controlled and the financial and IT industries get their percentages and data with every purchase. India, as a favorite guinea pig of the global cash abolitionists, often provides the blueprint...

from Lars Syll Little in the discipline has changed in the wake of the crisis. Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis … Mirowski argues that their attempt...

from Duncan Austin While Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand has many beneficial attributes, somewhere along the way the Invisible Hand was recast as the Infallible Hand, seeding today’s widespread faith that markets can solve large-scale social and ecological problems they are ill matched for. In the formidable shadow of the Infallible Hand, non-market solutions – policy, regulatory, cultural, behavioural – are often deemed ‘impractical’, so remain under-utilized. ‘Green growth’, ‘sustainable...

Lars Syll At the beginning of the year 2000, a book titled Irrational Exuberance was published. The American economics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller warned that the extensive deregulation in the financial market that had taken place since the Thatcher-Reagan era had led to a rapid credit expansion. Banks and financial institutions saw a skyrocketing increase in lending, and the pursuit of gaining larger market shares led to neglecting creditworthiness checks and accepting...

from Asad Zaman  Maeshiro (2016) in “The Capitalist Religion and the Production of Idols“, writes that Capital is the God, and Capitalism is the religion of modern society. Gauthier’s review of Nelson’s Economics As Religion states that “economics became the modern theology that replaced traditional theology as the set of doctrines that give meaning to our social reality and hope to our endeavors to improving our lives … (Nelson analyses) the works of the major twentieth century American...

from Lars Syll We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or dialectical. My goal is less the clarification of what...

I’m tinkering with the idea of a kind of periodic table for prices. Below, a very rough sketch of what I have in mind relating to administered prices and market prices as well as the sectors of the national accounts (cost prices, shadow prices etcetera have to be added). Gardiner Means defined the difference between market and administered prices (quoted in Gu (2012) on p. 13): “In an engineering economy prices are fixed by...