Real-World Economics Review

from Jayati Ghosh It is quite amazing that Karl Marx’s Capital has survived and been continuously in print for the past century and a half. After all, this big, unwieldy book (more than 2000 pages of small print in three fat volumes) still has sections that are evidently incomplete. Even in the best translations, the writing is dense and difficult, constantly veering off into tangential points and pedantic debates with now unknown writers. The ideas are complex and cannot be understood...

from David Ruccio Last fall, just before the presidential election, I posted a report on the perilous condition of the American working-class. Now, thanks to the Rand Corporation [ht: ja], we have a report on how terrible working conditions are in the United States. Most Americans between the ages of 25 and 71 spend most of their available time in a given day, week, or year forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to a small group of employers. Thus, as the authors of the...

from Lars Syll Until a few years ago, economists of all persuasions confidently proclaimed that the Great Depression would never recur. In a way, they were right. After the financial crisis of 2008 erupted, we got the Great Recession instead. Governments managed to limit the damage by pumping huge amounts of money into the global economy and slashing interest rates to near zero. But, having cut off the downward slide of 2008-2009, they ran out of intellectual and political ammunition....

from The Daily Californian (Berkeley) A recent study on gender stereotypes in the anonymous online forum Economics Job Market Rumors, or EJMR, revealed what appears to be a hostile environment toward women in some circles of the economics field. Recent campus graduate Alice Wu conducted the study as part of her senior thesis, using EJMR posts from 2014 to 2016. The focus of the study, according to Wu, was to “examine whether people in academia portray and judge women and men differently...

from Dean Baker When workers are doing badly you can always count on a large number of economists to come forward with ways to argue it really ain’t so. For example, we have heard endless stories about how our price indices hugely overstate inflation — we’re actually way better off than we think we are. Or, they point to the growth in non-wage benefits. One problem with that story is that non-wage benefits have been shrinking as a share of total compensation in recent years, not growing,...

from David Ruccio Russia is back in the news again in the United States, with the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election as well as a growing set of links between a variety of figures (including Cabinet and family members) associated with Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin.  This year is also the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, which sought to create the conditions for a transition to communism in the midst of a society...

from Lars Syll If economics was an honest profession, economists would focus their efforts on documenting the waste associated with protectionist barriers for professionals. They devoted endless research studies to estimating the cost to consumers of tariffs on products like shoes and tires. It speaks to the incredible corruption of the economics profession that there are not hundreds of studies showing the loss to consumers from the barriers to trade in physicians’ services. If trade...

from David Ruccio The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought — Rudi Dornbusch Last week, a wide variety of U.S. media (including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today) marked what they considered to be the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the global economic crisis—from which we still haven’t recovered.  The event in question, which occurred on 9 August 2007, was the announcement by international banking...

First time playing together in 2+ years.. at the Swiss Bell Open Mic night - 16th August 2017.. forgive the music stand and lyrics! 0.00 Tune 1 - The Light - Original - Dean Baker/Dave Day 4.24 Tune 2 - Nothing Compares - Prince/O'Connor 8.42 Tune 3 - Talk To Me - Original - Dean Baker/Terry Crouch

from Dean Baker Last week, I heard BBC announce the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis. This is dated to the decision by the French bank BNP Paribas to prohibit withdrawals from two hedge funds that were heavily invested in subprime mortgage backed securities. According to BBC, this was when lending began to freeze and house prices began to fall. The problem with BBC’s story is that house prices had already been falling for more than a year. While the nationwide...