Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker That one is apparently not on the agenda, at least according to Amanda Taub’s NYT “The Interpreter” piece. The piece notes the declining support for center right and center left parties in most western democracies. While it notes that people feel unrepresented by these parties, it never states the obvious, these parties have consistently supported monetary, fiscal, trade, and intellectual property policies that redistribute an ever-larger share of income to people like...

from Michael Hudson             If mathematics is deemed to be the new language of economics, it is a language with a thought structure whose semantics, syntax and vocabulary shape its user’s perceptions. There are many ways in which to think, and many forms in which mathematical ideas may be expressed. Equilibrium theory, for example, may specify the conditions in which an economy’s public and private-sector debts may be paid. But what happens when not all these debts can be paid?...

from Lars Syll McNees documented the radical break between the 1960s and 1970s. The question is: what are the possible responses that economists and economics can make to those events? One possible response is that of Professors Lucas and Sargent. They describe what happened in the 1970s in a very strong way with a polemical vocabulary reminiscent of Spiro Agnew. Let me quote some phrases that I culled from the paper: “wildly incorrect,” “fundamentally flawed,” “wreckage,” “failure,”...

from Herman Daly By definition this is the transition from a human population maintained by high birth rates equal to high death rates, to one maintained by low birth rates equal to low death rates, and consequently from a population with low average lifetimes to one with high average lifetimes. Statistically such transitions have often been observed as standard of living increases. Many studies have attempted to explain this correlation, and much hope has been invested in it as an...

from June Sekera More than a century ago, the effective operation of the public economy was a significant, active concern of economists. With the insurgence of market-centrism and rational choice economics, however, government was devalued, its role circumscribed and seen from a perspective of “market failure.” As Backhouse (2005) has shown, the transformation in economic thinking in the latter half of the 20th century led to a “radical shift” in worldview regarding the role of the state....

from Lars Syll You know, and I know, that we do not live in a world of Econs. We live in a world of Humans. And since most economists are also human, they also know that they do not live in a world of Econs … Nevertheless, this model of economic behavior based on a population consisting only of Econs has flourished, raising economics to that pinnacle of influence on which it now rests. Critiques over the years have been brushed aside with a gauntlet of poor excuses and implausible...

from David Ruccio I have often argued—in lectures, talks, and publications—that every economic theory has a utopian dimension. Economists don’t explicitly talk about utopia but, my argument goes, they can’t do what they do without some utopian horizon. The issue of utopia is there, at least in the background, in every area of economics—perhaps especially on the topic of control. Consider, for example, the theory of the firm (which I have written about many times over the years), which is...

from Lars Syll Many American undergraduates in Economics interested in doing a Ph.D. are surprised to learn that the first year of an Econ Ph.D. feels much more like entering a Ph.D. in solving mathematical models by hand than it does with learning economics. Typically, there is very little reading or writing involved, but loads and loads of fast algebra is required. Why is it like this? The first reason is that mathematical models are useful … A second beneficial reason is signalling....

from Norbert Häring Four years ago, I framed it as a question: “George Soros‘ INET: An institute to improve the world or a Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy?” Today I would not use a question mark any more.Frances Coppola came to a similiar conclusion after attending the big INET gathering in Edingburgh in October. On her blog Coppola reports about the conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, bankrolled initially by George Soros. He was joined by other hedge fund...

from Dean Baker Before anyone starts jumping off buildings, let me give you a few items to think about. 1) The stock market is not the economy. It moves in mysterious ways that often have little or nothing to do with the economy. In October of 1987 it plunged more than 20 percent in a single day. GDP grew 4.2 percent in 1988 and 3.7 percent in 1989. The market did recover much of its value over this period, but we don’t know whether or not it will recover the ground lost in the last week...