Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker Outlawing items such as marijuana or alcohol invariably leads to black markets and corruption. Since there is much money to be made by selling these products in violation of the law, many people will follow the money and break the law. They will also corrupt the legal system in the process, making payments to people in law enforcement and elsewhere in the legal system. The old line from economists on this problem is to take the money out, by making marijuana and alcohol...

CEPR Senior Economist Dean Baker appeared on NPR and discussed his reactions to President Biden's State of the Union address. View the full interview here: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/8/robinson_baker_duss_ramirez_4

President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday, touting his administration's achievements and laying out his plans for the next two years under a divided Congress, including on immigration, the economy, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who delivered a response to Tuesday's speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, and economist Dean Baker, who both applaud Biden's focus on income inequality and making the...

from Blair Fix We’re now in a position to look at the changing ideological landscape that is written in the English language. To quantify ideological change, I measure how the frequency of biblical/economics jargon has changed with time in the Google English corpus. Figure 10 shows my results. Here the blue line shows the annual frequency of biblical jargon. The red line shows the annual frequency of economics jargon. Note that the frequency is expressed per thousand words, so you can...

Our Company car

from Lars Syll The mainstream textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way, the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio. In his Macroeconomics — just to...

from Duncan Austin A major first response to our sustainability challenges has been to try and turn profit to more sustainable ends. Alas, even ‘purposeful profit’ seems unable to overcome the deeper momentum of what might be termed ‘externality-denying capitalism’ – ‘externality-denying’ in that billions of daily investment and consumption decisions ignore certain of their social and environmental consequences. As just one example, the World Bank reports that less than 4 percent of...