Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker Surprising no one, the Republicans outlined a tax plan that could mean huge tax cuts for the very rich with little or no tax reductions for the bulk of lower and middle income taxpayers. However in spite of their claimed “pro-growth” agenda, the plan included several provisions that will likely be a boon to the tax shelter industry and therefore an impediment to growth. The giveaways in the tax plan include the elimination of the estate tax, a great benefit to the tiny...

A conference from the World Economics Association – 2nd October to 30th November 2017 Conference leaders: John B. Davis and Wade Hands Keynote papers Strategies in relation to complexities: From neoclassical Cost-Benefit Analysis to Positional Analysis Peter Söderbaum In this essay neoclassical Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is criticized as beinng too simplistic and also too specific in ideological terms. Positional Analysis (PA) is advocated as an alternative based on a definition of...

from Lars Syll To understand real world ‘non-routine’ decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. When we cannot accept that the observations, along the time-series available to us, are independent … we have, in strict logic, no more than one observation, all...

Two days ago this blog published a blogpost by Jaques Sapir, a French economist, who stated that access to his RussEurope blog had been suspended because his posts had become to political… Interestingly, in the May 2008 issue of theReal World Economics Review, at a time when Jean-Claude Trichet, a French economists and former head of the ECB, still denied the crisis and even increased interest rates (22 July 2008: +0,25%), Sapir already had a keen insight into the nature and severity of...

from Peter Radford Whenever we are told about a Trump plan we have to use the word “plan” very carefully. Thus far Trump’s various plans have been more vague suggestions, hints, clues to what’s inside his head, or varieties of “what a plan were to look like were Trump to have an actual plan, but he doesn’t”. This week’s ballyhooed tax plan is no exception. It has been introduced as a framework. A skeleton. A coat hanger upon which Congress will need to hang actual policy in order to...

from Lars Syll We recommend dropping the NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] paradigm — and the p-value thresholds associated with it — as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p < 0.05 (or some other statistical threshold) to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more...

from Jacques Sapir Dear all,  Hypothese.org and Open Edition have suspended the access to my blog RussEurope. I can’t write anymore on my blog. In a short letter posted to my blog the Open Edition director, Mr Marin Dacos, explains that this measure is a reaction to the fact my last post are no more “academic”. Actually, I posted various kind of paper, from long technical papers to short pieces since the very beginning of my blog. Hence a post dating from September 22nd 2012 giving a good...

A whole score of Caribbean Islands seem to have been wiped out by a whole series of unusually strong hurricanes. These islands (Dominica, Puerto Rico, St-Maarten, Anguilla, …) need loads of outside help. But these societies have to  be resilient, too. Which means that they need money suited to this task: cash. See below. There is however a powerful lobby which tries to get rid of cash (i.e. government money) and to replace this with electronic bank moneys. Sad. Aside – once government...

from David Ruccio Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations makes for uncomfortable reading these days. That’s because, as my students this semester have learned, the father of modern mainstream economics—who has become so closely (and mistakenly) identified with the invisible hand—held a narrow theory of money and advocated extensive regulation of the banking sector. This is contrast to the obscene growth of banking in recent decades, which Rana Foroohar reminds “isn’t serving us, we’re serving...

from Lars Syll As we all know, neoliberalism is nothing but a self-serving con endorsing pernicious moral cynicism. But it’s still sickening to read its gobsmacking trash, maintaining that unregulated capitalism is a ‘superlatively moral system’: The rich man may feast on caviar and champagne, while the poor woman starves at his gate. And she may not even take the crumbs from his table, if that would deprive him of his pleasure in feeding them to his birds. David Gauthier Morals by...