Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker Last week the Trump administration announced that it was picking Larry Kudlow as the new head of the National Economic Council .Kudlow was a mid-level official in the Reagan administration before moving to Wall Street, but his greatest notoriety came as an economics talk show host for two decades. Kudlow made no bones about his views on his show. (Full disclosure: I was an occasional guest.) He began each segment by proclaiming his belief in free markets, free trade and...

from David Ruccio It was Paul Samuelson who, in 1997, declared with morbid optimism that “Funeral by funeral, economics does make progress.”* What Samuelson presumed is that, over time, wrong ideas would be killed and laid to rest and better ideas would flourish, thus creating the foundation for progress in economic thought. That’s what I consider to be the epistemological utopianism of mainstream economic thought: using the correct scientific methods, the work that economists do gets...

from Lars Syll The critic may respond that the game theorist’s victory in the debate is at best Pyrrhic, since it is bought at the cost of reducing the propositions of game theory to the status of ‘mere’ tautologies. But such an accusation disturbs the game theorist not in the least. There is nothing a game theorist would like better than for his propositions to be entitled to the status of tautologies, just like proper mathematical theorems. Ken Binmore When applying deductivist thinking...

Only after Mario Draghi’s ‘Whatever it takes’ (26 July 2012) low ECB policy interest rates started to translate decisively to lower rates for Mediterranean Eurozone borrowers. But ‘WIT’ did not only save (or at least: made live a little easier for) Italian and Spanish borrowers with legacy debts. Somehow, Dutch mortgage rates were also tied to the European bond rate instead of the ECB rate oor Dutch government bond rates (second graph) which meant that it was only after 26 July 2012, four...

from Dean Baker It is striking how the media universally accept the idea that patent and copyright monopolies are somehow free trade. We get that the people who own and control major news outlets like these forms of protection, but it is incredibly dishonest to claim that they are somehow free trade. We get this story yet again in a NYT piece complaining about China’s “theft” of intellectual property, while telling readers about how Trump’s proposed tariffs show his: “resolve to turn away...

from Asad Zaman Because of the universal spread and impact of Western educational systems, necessary for survival in the modern world, we have all learned to view the world through glasses manufactured in Europe. Just as a fish is unaware of the waters in which it swims, so we are unaware of the currents of history which have shaped European thought. Yet to understand the world we live in, and how our perceptions have been shaped by the dominance of West, it is essential to acquire an...

from Lars Syll Yours truly was interviewed last week for a radio program re the legacy and impact of Margaret Thatcher on society. The picture below conveys, in not so many words, my feelings and views on the subject … The rising inequality that has been going on in our societies since the Reagan-Thatcher era is outrageous. Income and wealth have​ increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a very small and privileged elite. And a society where we allow the inequality of incomes and...

from David Ruccio I have been arguing, since 2016 (e.g., here, here, and here), that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality. That’s because corporations would likely use a portion of their higher profits to engage in stock buybacks, leading to an increase in stock prices. And stock ownership in the United States is already grotesquely...

from Dean Baker Eswar Prasad makes the case in an NYT column that we should be paying attention to the selection of Yi Gang to head China’s central bank as a result of China’s status as the world’s second-largest economy. Prasad is right about the importance of China’s central bank in the world economy, but it is worth noting that by purchasing power parity (PPP) measures China is already by far the world’s largest economy. Purchasing power parity calculations of GDP attempt to measure...