Real-World Economics Review

from Norbert Häring With its Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, the lobby of the world’s largest corporations, supposedly wants to save the world from climate collapse. With a contribution on protecting the climate through Bitcoin, the powerful organisation proves- once again – that distrust is called for when it comes to corporate commitments to social goals. Greenwashing is the order of the day. Scandalously, the World Economic Forum is recognised as an international organisation,...

from Dean Baker I was very disappointed with Ezra Klein’s NYT interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, in large part because I have a high opinion of Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin and now the president of The Nation. My main disappointment stems from his non-answer to one of the main questions raised by Klein. Klein asked why the Democrats, and other liberal/left parties around the world, rely largely on more educated people for their support, while more working-class types have turned to the...

from Lars Syll In 1817 David Ricardo presented — in Principles — a theory that was meant to explain why countries trade and, based on the concept of opportunity cost, how the pattern of export and import is ruled by countries exporting goods in which they have a comparative advantage and importing goods in which they have a comparative disadvantage. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, however, didn’t explain why the comparative advantage was the way it was. At the beginning of the...

from Asad Zaman In a previous posts Preface to Radical Statistics and Why an Islamic Approach to Statistics?, I have explained how we can develop a new approach to statistics, which rejects a century of developments based on a methodology created by Sir Ronald Fisher, father of modern statistics. It is my hope that this will be a disruptive technology – it will eventually sweep away the entire structure of knowledge which has been built up under this name, and replace it with a radically...

from David Ruccio This was supposed to be the great reset. As the U.S. economy recovered from the Pandemic Depression, millions of jobs were being created, unemployment was falling, and the balance of power between workers and capitalists would shift toward wage-earners and against their employers. That, at least, was the promise (or, for capitalists, the fear). But greedflation has delivered exactly the opposite: workers’ real wages are barely rising while corporate profits are soaring....

from Lars Syll Science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them. There exists a reality beyond our theories and concepts of it. Contrary to positivism, yours truly would as a critical realist argue that the main task of science is not to detect event-regularities between observed facts, but rather to identify and explain the underlying structures/forces/powers/ mechanisms that produce the observed...

The highest CO2 Polluters per capita are dominated by oil producing countries who refine oil and emit CO2 in the oil extraction and refining process.

from Peter Soderbaum Climate change is perhaps the most threatening aspect of the ecological crisis but not the only one. Reduced biological diversity, reduced water availability and deteriorating water quality in some regions exemplify other relevant dimensions. On the financial side, the ‘market mechanism’ has been unable to come up to expectations. How can these problems be understood? Many factors have certainly contributed but in my judgment neoclassical economics as disciplinary...

from David Ruccio Inflation continues to run hot—and now, finally, the debate about inflation is heating up. On one side of the debate are mainstream economists and lobbyists for big business, the people Lydia DePillis refers to as having a simple mantra: “Supply and demand, Economics 101.” In their view, inflation is caused by supply and demand in the labor market, which is allowing workers’ wages to increase at an unsustainable rate (a story that, as I showed in April, has no validity),...

from Lars Syll This critique goes beyond the narrowly technical — that the workhorse neoclassical model of the economy was found to be lame when it came to running a real crisis race. The deeper critique is that these models, and the technical language that accompanies them, have played a role in policy and in society that has been disproportionate in two senses. First, disproportionate relative to our state of knowledge. Existing economic frameworks have shouldered a policy weight that...