Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio Chris Rock may be right. Still, Americans are well aware that economic inequality in their country is obscene, even though they often underestimate the growing gap between the poor and the rich.  But it’s Frank Rich, who conducted the interview with the American comedian, who made the more perceptive observation: For all the current conversation about income inequality, class is still sort of the elephant in the room. All the experts agree—from Thomas Piketty and the...

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

from  Lars Syll Professor Simon Wren-Lewis recently wrote: “The dangers of pluralism in economics: the case of MMT” … Wren-Lewis argues that MMT concepts can be explained using mainstream terminology. Since I tend to use fairly standard terminology, I cannot disagree with that argument. However, I would phrase it differently. Mainstream discussion of fiscal policy is almost invariably clouded with theoretical junk (“fiscal sustainability”, “budget constraints”, “intergenerational...

from Julie Nelson  Since the 1990s, I and some other feminist economists have been pointing out that the mainstream discipline of economics has a profoundly masculinist bias. That is, aspects of human nature, experience, and behavior that fit a culturally “macho” mold have been emphasized and elevated, while those that are culturally associated with a lesser-valued femininity have been ignored. The neoclassical orthodoxy focuses on markets and perhaps the public sphere, but categorizes...

Source: Economic Policy Institute

from Peter Radford This has been a long and miserable time. Deluged daily by strange and almost surrealistic gyrations in Washington I decided to sit to one side and simply watch. The spectacle of America rapidly decaying and apparently unable to prevent itself from gnawing away at its institutions is compelling. The regular attempts to undermine the credibility of everything meant to act as a bastion against tyranny is riveting. The subsequent indulgence in endless introspection about...

from Lars Syll The incorporation of new information makes sense only if the future is to be similar to the past. Any kind of empirical test, whatever form it adopts, will not make sense, however, if the world is uncertain because in such a world induction does not work. Past experience is not a useful guide to guess the future in these conditions (it only serves when the future, somehow, is already implicit in the present) … I believe the only way to use past experience is to assume that...

from David Ruccio Donald Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs—on solar panels and washing machines now, and perhaps on steel and aluminum down the line—has once again opened up the war concerning international trade. It’s not a trade war per se (although Trump’s free-trade opponents have invoked that specter, that the governments of other countries may retaliate with their import duties against U.S.-made products), but a battle over theories of international trade. And those...

from Lars Syll The trouble is not so much that macroeconomists say things that are inconsistent with the facts. The real trouble is that other economists do not care that the macroeconomists do not care about the facts. An indifferent tolerance of obvious error is even more corrosive to science than committed advocacy of error. Paul Romer  New-Classical-Real-Business-Cycles-DSGE-New-Keynesian microfounded macromodels try to describe and analyze complex and heterogeneous real economies...