Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio The release of the so-called Paradise Papers confirms, with additional names and more salacious details, what we already knew from the Panama Papers and other sources: the world’s wealthy increasingly use offshore tax havens to engage in conspicuous tax evasion. That’s on top of their participation in conspicuous consumption, conspicuous philanthropy, and conspicuous productivity. According to Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman, in a study...

from Lars Syll Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John Cochrane And the tiny little problem? It’s utterly and completely...

from Dean Baker The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that productivity grew at a 3.0 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2017. While this report got little attention, it is potentially very good news. Before going into the good news part, it is worth briefly saying a bit about what productivity is. Productivity measures the value of the goods and services produced in an hour of work. It is the main determinant of living standards. If we want more or better housing or...

from David Ruccio The official unemployment rate continues to fall in the United States. And everyone, at least among top policymakers and the business press, has been promising that workers’ wages will finally break out. As it turns out, the unemployment rate (the red line in the chart above) in September was 4.1 percent, far below the high of 10 percent in October of 2009 and a new low for the so-called recovery from the Second Great Depression. However, hourly wages (for production and...

from Lars Syll In advanced economics the question would be: ‘What besides mathematics should be in an economics lecture?’ In physics the familiar spirit is Archimedes the experimenter. But in economics, as in mathematics itself, it is theorem-proving Euclid who paces the halls … Economics … has become a mathematical game. The science has been drained out of economics, replaced by a Nintendo game of assumption-making … Most thoughtful economists think that the games on the blackboard and...

One of the advantages of marketeers, compared with neoclassical economists, is that they do not assume things about consumers but observe them or ask them questions. So did Nielsen India, a large marketing company, less then a month after the infamous Indian demonetisation. The report is ungated and, for one thing, contains valuable information about the female experience. An excerpt PART B: DECODING CONSUMER SENTIMENT (Source: Nielsen India)To pick up the consumer sentiment at this point...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economics lies in tatters. Certainly, the crash of 2007-08 and the Second Great Depression called into question mainstream macroeconomics, which has failed to provide a convincing explanation of either the causes or consequences of the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But mainstream microeconomics, too, increasingly appears to be a fantasy—especially when it comes to issues of corporate power. Neoclassical...

from Edward Fullbrook Determinism, the idea that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way, and atomism, the idea that the world is made up of entities whose qualities are independent of their relations with other entities, are fundament components of classical mechanics. Atomism is also central to the concept of mind developed in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published (1690) three years after Newton’s Principia....

from David Ruccio    Inequality in the United States is now so obscene that it’s impossible, even for mainstream economists, to avoid the issue of surplus.   Consider the two charts at the top of the post. On the left, income inequality is illustrated by the shares of pre-tax national income going to the top 1 percent (the blue line) and the bottom 90 percent (the red line). Between 1976 and 2014 (the last year for which data are available), the share of income at the top soared, from...

from Dean Baker The most popular explanation for the sharp rise in inequality over the last four decades is technology. The story goes that technology has increased the demand for sophisticated skills while undercutting the demand for routine manual labor. This view has the advantage over competing explanations, like trade policy and labor market policy, that it can be seen as something that happened independent of policy. If trade policy or labor market policy explain the transfer of...