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Real-World Economics Review

Economic forecasting — why it matters and why it is so often wrong

from Lars Syll As Oskar Morgenstern noted in his 1928 classic Wirtschaftsprognose: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten, economic predictions and forecasts amount to little more than intelligent guessing. Making forecasts and predictions obviously isn’t a trivial or costless activity, so why then go on with it? The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really underline how important it is for social sciences to incorporate Keynes’s...

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Ecological reasoning demands perspectives that economics is designed to obliterate

from Gregory A. Daneke  Given the numerous disasters exhibited of late involving Mainstream Economics, various heterodox economists have called for much greater consideration of ecological processes (both natural and social, see Fullbrook & Morgan, 2001).  Such processes, in turn, have become increasingly illuminated through the burgeoning science of complex adaptive systems (e.g., Preiser, et al, 2018). What some of these earnest observers fail to fully appreciate, however, is that...

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An age of crisis

from Oxfam An age of crisis, causing huge suffering for most of humanity As billionaires, government leaders and corporate executives jet in to meet atop their mountain in Davos, Switzerland, the world faces a dramatic, dangerous and destructive set of simultaneous crises. These are having a terrible impact on the majority of people, something Oxfam sees in its work across the world. In 2022, the World Bank announced that we will fail to meet the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030,...

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Hyman Minsky and the IS-LM obfuscation

from Lars Syll As a young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the pleasure and privilege of having Hyman Minsky as a teacher. He was a great inspiration at the time. He still is. The concepts which it is usual to ignore or deemphasize in interpreting Keynes — the cyclical perspective, the relations between investment and finance, and uncertainty, are the keys to an understanding of the full significance of his contribution … The glib assumption made by Professor Hicks in his...

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Debt, deficits, secular stagnation and the which way is up problem in economics

from Dean Baker The economy can have a problem of too much demand, leading to serious inflationary pressures. It can also have a problem of too little demand, leading to slow growth and unemployment. But can it have both at the same time? Apparently, the leading lights in economic policy circles seem to think so. As I noted a few days ago, back in the 1990s and 00s economists were almost universally warning of the bad effects of an aging population. The issue was that we would have too...

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