Real-World Economics Review

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...

from David Ruccio U.S. capitalism has a real problem: there don’t seem to be enough workers to keep the economy growing. And it has another problem: capitalists themselves are to blame for the missing workers. As is clear from the chart above, the employment-population ratio (the blue line) has collapsed from a high of 64.4 in 2000 to 59 in 2014 (and had risen to only 60.1 by the end of 2017).* During the same period, the average real incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have...

On Monday, Feb. 26, Center for Economic and Policy Research staff and friends gathered to thank Dean Baker for 18 years as CEPR’s Co-Director. Here are Dean's remarks given at the end of the evening.

from Dean Baker It is amazing how frequently we hear people asserting that the massive inequality we are now seeing in the United States is the result of an unfettered market. I realize that this is a convenient view for those who are on the upside of things, but it also happens to be nonsense. Today’s highlighted nonsense pusher is Amy Chua, who warns in a NYT column about the destructive path the United States is now on where an disaffected white population takes out its wrath on...

from Lars Syll For me, the study of asymmetric information was a very first step toward the realization of a dream. That dream was the development of a behavioral macroeconomics in the original spirit of Keynes’ General Theory. Macroeconomics would then no longer suffer from the ad hockery of the neoclassical synthesis, which had over-ridden the emphasis in The General Theory on the role of psychological and sociological factors, such as cognitive bias, reciprocity, fairness, herding, and...

from Lars Syll But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for certain … At any given time facts and expectations were assumed to be given in a definite and calculable form … The calculus of probability, tho mention of it was kept in the background, was supposed to be capable of reducing uncertainty to the same calculable status as that of...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The current WEA Conference: Monetary Policy after the Global Crisis marks the tenth anniversary of the greatest recession after 1929-33. The aims of this conference include discussing key theoretical insights in order: To provide a framework for improving monetary policy practices. To review and advance knowledge on the recent financial crisis regarding the main challenges and prospects of central banking. To particularly survey and discuss the use of Divisia...

from  Asad Zaman Preliminary Remarks: “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.” From The Trouble with Macroeconomics (Paul Romer) Personally, I do not understand why indifference to error is worse than committed...

from Lars Syll There is something about the way economists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics still has not given way to methodological pluralism based on ontological considerations (rather than formalistic tractability). In their search for model-based rigour and certainty, ‘modern’ economics has turned out to be a...