Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford One of the controversies buried by contemporary economists in their great cause of advocating market freedoms, is that of the role of central panning. There was a time when economics accomodated controversy. Nowadays it’s arguments are securely contained within the narrow bounds of saltwater versus freshwater type spats that are little more than professional name calling inspired over minor differences of detail. Recall the capital controversy? No? How about the...

from Lars Syll In the latest issue of Fronesis yours truly and a couple of other academics (e.g. Julie Nelson, Tony Lawson, and Phil Mirowski) made an effort at introducing its readers to heterodox economics and its critique of mainstream economics. Rather unsurprisingly this hasn’t pleased the Swedish economics establishment. On the mainstream economics blog Ekonomistas, professor Daniel Waldenström today rode out to defend the mainstream with the nowadays standard defense — heterodox...

from David Ruccio One of the arguments I made in my piece on “Class and Trumponomics” (serialized on this blog—here, here, here, and here—and recently published as a single article in the Real-World Economics Review [pdf]) is that, in the United States, the class dynamic underlying the growing gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else was the much-less-remarked-upon divergence in the capital and wage shares of national income. Thus, I concluded, “the so-called recovery, just like...

What do you get when you apply a 13 year smoothing function to the yearly data on global temperature? The graph above. According to ‘climate optimists’ the graph above is misleading, as, for one thing, these surface data are supposed to show a different pattern of development than the ‘satellite data’. The point: they don’t. The graph above shows about 0,7 to 0,8 degrees warming after 1979 and a pattern of relentless increase. The ‘satellite  data’ (graph below) show 0,5 degrees warming...

from Peter Radford One of the least credible aspects of economics, an enterprise that suffers from a credibility problem at the best of times, is that of general equilibrium. Chasing after this mirage comes at a great cost. For one thing it makes economists look more like priests than scientists or even artists. It is an article of faith, not anything remotely plausible in a real economy. Any reference to general equilibrium in an article, book, or paper, automatically disqualifies its...

from Lars Syll In connection with being awarded The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel a couple of years ago, Thomas Sargent, in an interview with Swedish Television, declared that workers ought to be prepared for having low unemployment compensations in order to get the right incentives to search for jobs. This old mercantilist idea has very little support in research, since it has turned out to be exceedingly difficult to really get clear cut results...

from Julie Nelson I thought that any reasonable person would be revolted by the narcissistic, juvenile, bullying, lying behavior of the Republican candidate, and realize that he was clearly unfit for office. As an economist, I was taken aback by the variously kleptocratic and fantastical aspects of Trump’s intended economic directions. As a feminist and ecological economist, I was especially appalled by Trump’s braggadocious pussy-grabbing and climate-change-denying. While, according to...

from Norbert Häring The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington has published a Working Paper on “de-cashing”. It gives advice to governments who want to abolish cash against the will of their citizenry. Move slowly, start with harmless seeming measures, is part of that advice. In “The Macroeconomics of De-Cashing”, IMF-Analyst Alexei Kireyev recommends in his conclusions: Although some countries most likely will de-cash in a few years, going completely cashless should be phased...

from David Ruccio This semester, we’re teaching A Tale of Two Depressions, a course designed as a comparison of the first and second Great Depressions in the United States. And one of the themes of the course is that, in considering the conditions and consequences of the two depressions, we’re talking about a tale of two countries. As it turns out, the tale of two countries may be even more true in the case of the most recent crises of capitalism. That’s because the two countries were...

from Robert Wade In this context globalization refers to the opening of domestic markets and the integration of global production via multinational corporations (MNCs). More broadly, it refers to  movement in the world economy towards “one country”, or “deep (not shallow) integration”, where nation states have no more influence over flows of goods, services, capital, finance, ideas and people across borders than South Dakota or the other US states have across theirs. Ever since the 1980s...