Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio Back in 2010, Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job, exposed the failure of prominent mainstream economists who wrote about and spoke on matters of economic policy to disclose their conflicts of interest in the lead-up to the crash of 2007-08. Reuters followed up by publishing a special report on the lack of a clear standard of disclosure for economists and other academics who testified before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee...

From George Monbiot in The Guardian: Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them. The failure to get to grips with our crises, by all mainstream political parties, is likely to lead to a war between the major powers in my lifetime Over this time,...

On his insightful ‘conversable economist’ blog the excellent Timothy Taylor has a good piece about European unemployment which as follows: American readers: can you imagine the social turmoil in the US if the unemployment rate has been above 10% for the last seven years, instead of peaking at 10% back in October 2009 and falling down to about 5% by a year ago in fall 2015? Can you imagine if half of these unemployed had been looking for work for more than a year? Consider the difference,...

from David Ruccio In the first installment of this series on “class before Trumponomics,” I argued that the recovery from the crash of 2007-08 created conditions that were favorable to capital at the expense of labor—and that trend represented a continuation of the class dynamic that had characterized the U.S. economy for decades, going back at least to the early 1980s. There are, of course, many details that were left out of that story, and I want to present a more fine-grained class...

from Asad Zaman PRELIMINARY REMARKS: Philosopher Hilary Putnam writes in “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Distinction” that there are cases where we can easily and clearly distinguish between facts and values — the objective and the subjective. However, it is wrong to think that we can ALWAYS do so. There are many sentences, especially in economic theories, where the two are “inextricably entangled” . This is the fourth post in a sequence about Re-Reading Keynes. This post is focused on a...

Since 1975 workers have received almost none of the gains of increased productivity, which has increased by 143% since around 1975 (figure 14). In other words, productivity has more than doubled, while workers received none of the gains. This can be explained by the deindustrialization of the US economy, as heavy industries followed by manufacturing in general were exported to Asia. Due to this trend there was a huge decrease in unionization which went from 39% in 1940 to around 10% in...

from Asad Zaman This 1000 word article is the third in a series of posts on Re-Reading Keynes. It traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century, as necessary background knowledge for a contextual and historically situated study of Keynes. It was published in Express Tribune on 4 Nov 2016. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic...

from David Ruccio Right now, after Donald’s Trump surprising victory and in the midst of the messy transition, everyone is curious about how the U.S. economy will change if and when the president-elect’s economic policies are enacted.* But first things first. We need to have a clear understanding of what the U.S. economy looks like now, during the uneven recovery from the Second Great Depression. In particular, it’s important to analyze the class dimensions of that recovery, even before...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump has basically come right out said that he intends to use the presidency to further enrich himself and his family. After refusing to follow long-established precedent and put his assets in a blind trust, he proclaimed, “the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Of course the president absolutely can have a conflict of interest as speakers of the English language use the expression. If a president owns a large business empire, as does Mr. Trump, there...

from David Ruccio Yes, the late Richard Rorty got it spot on: Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point,...