Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford One of the great pleasures of living here in southern Vermont is that we have a terrific local bookshop. I go there simply to absorb that book shop vibe unattainable in the bits and bytes of Amazon. And like all good bookshops this one throws up surprises. About three weeks ago I was browsing the small business and economics section and found a book by Heinz Kurz. It’s his “Economic Thought, A Brief History” I recommend it for all of you who want to understand the...

from Lars Syll Little in the discipline has changed in the wake of the crisis. Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis … Mirowski argues that their attempt...

from Jayati Ghosh It is probably obvious to everyone that global capitalism is in dire straits, notwithstanding the brave talking up of output recovery that now characterises almost every meeting of the international governing elite. Even so, discussions of the end of capitalism still typically seem overstated and futile, not least because those hoping and mobilising for bringing in an alternative system are everywhere so scattered, weak and demoralised. In effect, capitalism is the only...

from David Ruccio Everyone, it seems, now agrees that there’s a fundamental problem concerning wages and productivity in the United States: since the 1970s, productivity growth has far outpaced the growth in workers’ wages.* Even Larry Summers—who, along with his coauthor Anna Stansbury, presented an analysis of the relationship between pay and productivity last Thursday at a conference on the “Policy Implications of Sustained Low Productivity Growth” sponsored by the Peterson Institute...

from Asad Zaman Karl Marx said that “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.” Modern economic theory is a tool of central importance in making the laborers and the poor accept their own exploitation as natural and necessary. As explained in greater detail in the next lecture (AM09), Economic Theory argues that distribution of income is FAIR –...

from Peter Radford Taxes. What a problem. I was going to start by saying something about our current national debate about taxes, but that would have been an untruth. We are not having a debate. Instead we are all sitting on the sidelines whilst the Republican Party desperately tries to cobble together a tax plan in order to fulfill one of the promises it made during last year’s election. That this would be the only major promise thus fulfilled we can ignore for now. Instead, I think I...

from David Ruccio Thanks to the release of the so-called Paradise Papers, and the additional research conducted by Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Tørsløv, and Ludvig Wier, we know that a large share of the surplus captured by corporations is artificially shifted to tax havens all over the world. This, of course, is on top of the conspicuous tax evasion practiced by the individual holders of a large portion of the world’s wealth.   Thus, for example, U.S. multinational corporations now claim to...

from Lars Syll Our admiration for technical virtuosity should never blind us to the fact that we have to have a cautious attitude towards probabilistic inferences in economic contexts. Science should help us disclose causal forces behind apparent ‘facts.’ We should look out for causal relations, but econometrics can never be more than a starting point in that endeavour since econometric (statistical) explanations are not explanations in terms of mechanisms, powers, capacities or causes....

from Edward Fullbrook In public, including in the training of economists, Neoclassical economics usually reads its models backwards. This gives the illusion that they show the behaviour of individual economic units determining sets of equilibrium values for markets and for whole economies. It hides the fact that these models have been constructed not by investigating the behaviour of individual agents, but rather by analysing the requirements of achieving a certain macro state, that is, a...

Did the growth of money caused by QE in the Eurozone (graph) stimulate economic activity? Not enough. According to John Maynard Keynes, in ‘The general theory’ (1936), “The relation of changes in M (money) to Y (income) and r (the interest rate) depends, in the first instance, on the way in which changes in M come about.” Put differently: credit and not money makes the world go round. Money creating lending to enable household purchases of existing homes has a quite different effect on...