Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Gödel’s incompleteness theorems raise important questions about the foundations of mathematics. The most important concerns the question of how to select the specific systems of axioms that mathematics are supposed to be founded on. Gödel’s theorems irrevocably show that no matter what system is chosen, there will always have to be other axioms to prove previously unproved truths. This, of course, ought to be of paramount interest for those mainstream economists who still...

Via Eurostat (look here and here) information about the labour market: vacancy rates and wages. Vacancies are up, wages are rising at a very moderate rate (and in many countries, like Spain, not at all). These are wage costs and not wages, but at this moment the difference is small, notice that wages increase less than the 2$ inflation target of the ECB. Vacancies have developed favorably. About this: during the last year there have been tailwinds: (much) lower prices for energy,...

from Jamie Morgan and RWER no. 78 As a brand, Trump is also a particular kind of contemporary businessman. He positions himself as a maker of “deals” rather than a maker of things, though his wealth is rooted in construction and property. He is an owner of portfolio assets, who uses these to leverage new ventures where he is able to conjure personal gain from situations where material benefits to the many may be lacking. His skill set is one of concentration and extraction of returns, and...

from Steven Pressman and RWER no. 78 According to Thomas Piketty (2014), between 1980 and 2010 the share of total US income going to the top 10% of earners rose from around 30-35%, where it stood for several decades, to nearly 50%. These are very conservative estimates. Piketty’s figures come from the distribution of adjusted gross income (AGI), reported by the US Internal Revenue Service. AGI subtracts from income things like investment losses, retirement account contributions and their...

download whole issue Preface          download pdf Trumponomics: everything to fear including fear itself?          3Jamie Morgan          download pdf                                                                            Can Trump overcome secular stagnation?          20James K. Galbraith            download pdf                              Trump through a Polanyi lens: considering community well-being          28Anne Mayhew            download pdf                                 ...

from David Ruccio According to calculations by Kenneth Thomas (based on data in the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report), the United States has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any rich nation.   And it’s not even close! Thomas calculates the ratio of mean to median wealth for each country (the last column in the table above) to devise a measure of wealth inequality. As you can see, the U.S. inequality ratio is more than 50% higher than #2 Denmark and fully three times as...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts …. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must be entirely...

I made this graph (in fact: map) because of remarks by Erdogan, the Turkish president, that Turkish women in Europe should get more children: 5 instead of 3: wasn’t the birth rate (total fertility rate) in Turkey already way below 3? Thanks to a recent press release of Turkstat I discovered that, surprisingly (at least to me), the birthrate in many western areas of Turkey , about 1,6 or even lower, is as low as in countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece etcetera. The entire...

from David Ruccio Both Peter Temin and I are concerned about the vanishing middle-class and the desperate plight of most American workers. We even use similar statistics, such as the growing gap between productivity and workers’ wages and the share of income captured by the top 1 percent.   And, as it turns out, both of us have invoked Arthur Lewis’s “dual economy” model to make sense of that growing gap. However, we present very different interpretations of the Lewis model and how it...