Real-World Economics Review

from today’s Guardian In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students’ first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts. Without us...

from Lars Syll The trouble is, too many theorists — especially in the mainstream of the discipline — have drifted far from the real world. Their ambition has been to build mathematically elegant and internally consistent models of the economy, even if that requires wholly unrealistic assumptions. Granted, just as maps have to simplify complex terrain, theoretical models must ignore aspects of reality to be any use. But there’s a line between simplification and gross distortion, and modern...

from Asad Zaman Part 2 of Lecture on Spirituality and Development: Friday, 27th Jan 2017 by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE — for Students of Religion & Development Paper, Center of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. Click here to read outline of lecture and click here to watch the lecture.

from Dean Baker The media have been filled with accounts in recent years of how automation is displacing workers and threatening the country with mass unemployment. Even President Obama even made a point of warning about the dangers of mass displacement from automation in his farewell address. This obsession is bizarre for two reasons. The first is a simple empirical point. In contrast to the concern about automation leading to massive displacement, in recent years the pace of automation...

from Stuart Birks and the WEA Newsletter Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are noted examples of dystopian literature. In contrast to idyllic utopian literature, they describe what might be considered to be seriously flawed societies. The authors wished to warn of potential dangers that might arise in the future. Huxley later published a follow-up collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited (1958) (BNWR). In...

from David Ruccio Readers know the old adage: in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. And, we should add, employers complaining they can’t find enough good workers. The fact is, if workers were really scarce, their wages would be rising dramatically. That’s how things works in a capitalist labor market: employers who want to hire workers offer higher wages. But, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings of...

from Lars Syll Limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we “export” them to our “target systems”, we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real...

from Asad Zaman Friday, 26th Jan 2017: Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE to students at University of Cambridge, Center of Development Studies for Religion & Development paper. 40 minute video recording of lecture on you-tube. Part 1: “What Is Spirituality?”:  Modern Secular thought takes spirituality and religion to be diseases which affect weak minds not properly trained in the scientific method. Part I of this lecture explains why this view, which is based on positivist ideas, is...

According to the European Commission, Spain does well. And it does: after 6 years of decline employment has increased with 1,2 million. This is, when it comes to EU job creation, a decisive development! But… well, look at graph 1. Employment is nowhere where it has to be. And double digit increases in the number of tourists won’t last forever – Spain will need a new growth sector (or a more equitable division of labor). When it comes to this:  half of the employment increase took place...

Ashoka Mody on Bloomberg Then came the cardinal error: At the IMF’s Board, over the fierce opposition of several executive directors, the Europeans and Americans pushed through a bailout program that, contrary to the fund’s rules, did not impose losses on Greece’s private creditors. The decision was based on a spurious claim that “restructuring” private debt would trigger a global financial meltdown. Thus, European governments and the IMF lent Greece a vast sum to repay its existing...