Real-World Economics Review

Source: https://asociologist.com/2013/04/12/visualizing-inequality-in-the-us-1947-2011/

from Dean Baker Ever since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007–2008 that gave us the Great Recession, there has been a large doom and gloom crowd anxious to tell us another crash is on the way. Most insist this one will be even worse than the last one. They are wrong. Both the housing bubble in the last decade and the stock bubble in the 1990s were easy to see. It was also easy to see that their collapse would throw the economy into a recession since both bubbles were driving the...

from Lars Syll Comparing the limited work of Wicksell, Le Bourva, and MMT, we find that they share many similarities. Obviously, the institutions and issues being discussed have changed during the decades these scholars were writing, yet all three views agree on some fundamental issues. The methodology is quite similar, with a strong focus on balance sheets opposed to theoretical models based on assumptions that are necessary for the mathematics to work. There is also a strong consensus...

from David Ruccio The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.* But the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even more unequal—and, if business as usual continues, it will...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg Source: http://fortune.com/2018/02/09/us-life-expectancy-dropped-again/ Source: https://twitter.com/beauwillimon/status/889170390949519361

from Lars Syll Olivier Blanchard’s intellectual path, exploring different avenues – sometimes non-linear, sometimes even contradictory – can be considered as the personification of the controversial​ evolution of mainstream macroeconomic research during the last three decades … Assessing this complex intellectual path, nevertheless, also helps to understand why Blanchard’s analyses are ultimately limited by the mainstream framework, and by the role he decided to play in its defense. The...

Inter-EU flows of ‘labour’ have dramatically increased (figure 1, figure 2), which leads to problems in sending as well as receiving countries. New EU legislation tries to restrict the extent to which entrants can be used to circumvent existing labour laws to unfairly undercutting labour in the receiving countries (and ‘fairness’ is as fundamental an incentive to people working as their wage). This legislation is welcome. But it is too late. Or is it ‘too little’? Can sending countries...

from Asad Zaman This is the second lecture on Understanding the Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard — shortlink: bit.do/azifa2 — we start with a  Summary of First Lecture  The first lecture discusses the Keynesian theory that the exact level of money in an economy is critically important – too little leads to recessions, while too much leads to inflations. Furthermore, domestic business cycles, and international financial crises are caused by pro-cyclical behavior of current artificial...

from Lars Syll Neoliberals and libertarians have always provided a lot of ideologically founded ideas and ‘theories’ to underpin their Panglossian view on markets. But when they are tested against the ​reality they usually turn out to be wrong. The promised results are simply not to be found. And that goes for for-profit schools too.  The Swedish school system has somewhat oddly combined market principles such as decentralization, choice, competition, and corporate providers with an...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar Much of the writing on Walmart’s purchase of a dominant 77 per cent stake in Flipkart, touted for long as India’s answer to Amazon, is focused on its size. At $16 billion, of which $14 billion goes to buy up the stakes of investors such as SoftBank from Japan and Naspers from South Africa, it is reportedly the biggest acquisition in the global e-commerce area, and way larger than $3.3 billion that Walmart paid for US web retailer Jet.com in a deal considered the...