Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll In its ‘scientific background’ description on the 2017 ‘Nobel prize’ in economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences writes (emphasis added): In order to build useful models, economists make simplifying assumptions. A common and fruitful simplification is to assume that agents are perfectly rational. This simplification has enabled economists to build powerful models to analyze a multitude of different economic issues and markets. What absolute nonsense! Writing this...

from Lars Syll Today The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it  has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2017 to Richard Thaler. A good choice for once! To yours truly Thaler’s main contribution has been to show that one of the main building blocks of modern mainstream economics — expected utility theory — is fundamentally wrong. If a friend of yours offered you a gamble on the toss of a coin where you could lose...

Decoupling is the idea that when societies get richer, additional units of GDP will require less physical resources and will produce less carbon dioxide. This seems true when we look at national rich country production data. But it is not true when we look at rich country consumption data – as we outsourced energy and material intensive parts of producing our consumption goods to developing countries. We really have to blame our consumption pattern… Look here for an article of Mir and...

from David Ruccio It’s clear that, for decades now, American workers have been falling further and further behind. And there’s simply no justification for this sorry state of affairs—nothing that can rationalize or excuse the growing gap between the majority of people who work for a living and the tiny group at the top. But that doesn’t stop mainstream economists from trying. Look, they say, American workers are clearly better off than they were before. Both real weekly earnings (the...

from Julie Nelson Yes, economics has a problem with women. In the news recently we’ve heard about the study of the Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) on-line forum. Student researcher Alice H. Wu found that posts about women were far more likely to contain words about their personal and physical issues (including “hot,” “lesbian,” “cute,” and “raped” ) than posts about men, which tended to focus more on academic and professional topics. As a woman who has been in the profession for over...

from Peter Radford Let me be very quick: Geography is not taught [if it is taught at all] as if there are no rivers, mountains, plains, valleys, coasts, seas, or oceans. Cities, towns, villages and the networks that connect them exist in even the most elementary geography lesson. Geographers don’t begin their lessons by ignoring reality. They dive right in and use the real world as the backdrop for teaching the processes and forces that result in what we actually see. So why does...

from Lars Syll Nash equilibrium has since it was introduced back in the 50’s come to be the standard solution concept used by game theorists. The justification for its use has mainly built on dubious and contentious assumptions like ‘common knowledge’ and individuals exclusively identified as instrumentally rational. And as if that wasn’t enough, one actually, to ‘save’ the Holy Equilibrium Grail, has had to further make the ridiculously unreal assumption that those individuals have...

from David Ruccio They keep promising, ever since the recovery from the Great Recession started more than eight years ago, that workers’ wages will finally begin to increase. But they’re not. Sure, profits continue to rise. And so is the stock market. But not wages. And mainstream economists can’t come up with an adequate explanation of why that’s the case. We’ve all heard or read the story. According to mainstream economists, as the unemployment rate falls (the blue line in the chart...

from Peter Radford So we go through it all again. We go through the constant call for payers. The incessant search for reasons; the outpouring of emotion; the interviews; the graphics; the enumeration of mayhem; the grief of families; the interviews with experts; and the silence of the voices lost. There are never, however, efforts to deal with the problem. America is obsessed with guns. It adores them It worships them. It is sick with guns. Blame it on the foolishness of the second...

from Lars Syll Research shows not only that individuals sometimes act differently than standard economic theories predict, but that they do so regularly, systematically, and in ways that can be understood and interpreted through alternative hypotheses, competing with those utilised by orthodox economists. To most market participants — and, indeed, ordinary observers — this does not seem like big news … In fact, this irrationality is no news to the economics profession either. John Maynard...