Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio Liberal stories about who’s been left behind during the Second Great Depression are just about as convincing as the “breathtakingly clunky” 2014 movie starring Nicolas Cage. For Thomas B. Edsall, the story is all about the people in the “rural, less populated regions of the country” who have been left behind in the “accelerated shift toward urban prosperity and exurban-to-rural stagnation” and who supported Republicans in the most recent election.  Louis Hyman, for his...

from Lars Syll The only economic analysis that mainstream economists accept is the one that takes place within the analytic-formalistic modeling strategy that makes up the core of mainstream economics. All models and theories that do not live up to the precepts of the mainstream methodological canon are pruned. You’re free to take your models — not using (mathematical) models at all is considered totally unthinkable — and apply them to whatever you want — as long as you do it within the...

from Edward Fullbrook Steve Keen has a new book out: Can we avoid another financial crisis?  Keen, as you probably know, was one of those economists – Nouriel Roubini, Dean Baker, Ann Pettifor, Michael Hudson, Wynne Godley and others – who warned well in advance that the Global Financial Crash was coming if preventive measures were not taken.  How did these economists clearly see the crash coming when neoclassical economists did not, not even the day before it happened?  Keen’s new book...

from Maria Alejandra Madi A relevant feature of the current crisis in economic knowledge is the recurrence of the  Ricardian Vice. Joseph A. Schumpeter coined this term in his book History of Economic Analysis when he criticized the habit assigned to Ricardo to represent the economy by a set of simplified assumptions and to use tautologies to develop practical economic solutions. Indeed, Schumpeter rejected the kind of economic thought that mainly favours deductive methods of inquiry –...

The ECB buys lots of bonds from large oil companies, not from small and medium enterprises. Rapid money supply growth does not cause inflation (measurements!) New UK guidelines on how to estimate natural capital. Surely worth the effort! But some things do not have a price for a good reason. And when you look really, really hard at statistics of the stock of capital it turns out that statisticians measure the value of rights to the monetary yield of ownership of certain items. And not any...

from Lars Syll Of course economics involves cases where economists appear too reluctant to give up their favoured models. You can find similar stories in the hard sciences. There will be more such stories in economics because the inexact nature of economics makes it easier to discount any single piece of evidence. What I cannot understand is what leads someone … to argue against the use of evidence, and instead that “economics is primarily a way of organizing one’s thinking”. Astrology is...

from David Ruccio As we know, the share of part-time faculty in U.S. higher education has increased dramatically over the past four decades. According to the latest report from the American Association of University Professors (pdf), Part-time faculty today comprise approximately 40 percent of the academic labor force, a slightly larger share than tenured and tenure-track faculty combined. While the category of part-time faculty includes professors temporarily teaching on a percentage...

from Peter Radford It is easy to be partisan. It is easy to believe in sweeping utopian solutions. It is easy to delude yourself that what you think is what everyone thinks, or, perhaps, what they ought to think. This is why I recoil from anyone offering definitive answers to complex questions. The truth is never so easily teased from reality. A healthy does of skepticism helps to keep us grounded. It seems we need that protection especially right now. Why now? Because I feel we are going...

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from Lars Syll One way that macroeconomics stands out from other fields in economics is in how often it produces forecasts. The vast majority of empirical models in economics can be very successful at identifying causal relations or at fitting explaining behavior, but they are never used to provide unconditional forecasts, nor do people expect them to. Macroeconomists, instead, are asked to routinely produce forecasts to guide fiscal and monetary policy, and are perhaps too eager to...