Real-World Economics Review

From: Geoff Davies (reblogged from: Our better nature) (a comparable graph not including 2016 has been published a few days ago, developments in 2016 are however so extreme and out of sample that this data has to be included, too, M.K.) A couple of graphs show the extraordinary nature of the present situation. 1998 used to be one of the biggest outliers from the general trend. 2016 is going way beyond that. The second graph shows the deviation from the recent trend more clearly: It...

The WEA online conferenceFood and JusticeIdeas for a new global food agenda is now openThe DISCUSSION FORUM  is open access.

from Dean Baker I will claim no special insight into the politics that led to Trump’s election last Tuesday. I was as surprised as anyone else when not just Florida and North Carolina, but also Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin started to turn red. But that’s history now. We have to live with the fact of President Trump and we have to figure out how to protect as much as possible of what we value in this country from his presidency. This won’t be easy when the Republicans control both...

Most tables of the normal distribution stop at 3 standard distributions or, to state this differently, at the point were (assuming a stable world) the chance that an individual estimate of a variable is farther removed from the average of all estimated variables is 1:1000. Let’s call this the black swan point. Estimates further removed from the average are ‘black swans’. Such estimates might indicate that we’ve moved to a new situation with a new average. Ahem: arctic and antarctic sea...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The huge growth of deregulated finance has been associated to a new financial regime and great transformations in the pattern of economic growth. Looking back, there has been  a narrow relationship between the crisis of the post-war accumulation pattern, the evolution of the international monetary system and the process of financial deregulation. In fact, as Bello (2006) warned, in the 1980s, Reaganism and structural adjustment were not successful attempts to...

from Peter Radford Well, that was fun. A rebellion has swept away the establishment. I never thought I would say that the rebellion would be manifested within the GOP and that the establishment would be within the Democrats, but that’s what we just witnessed. We on the left must accept that whatever we were saying just didn’t resonate with enough people. The Democrat’s obsession with identity politics that allowed it to ignore the consequences of its embrace of neoliberal economics has...

from David Ruccio For decades now, the labor share of U.S. national income (the blue line measured on the left-hand vertical axis in the chart above) has steadily declined, while the shares of income and wealth captured by the top 1 percent (the red and green lines on the right-hand axis) has increased. And in recent years, even as employment has mostly recovered from the Second Great Depression, the wages paid to the majority of workers have continued to stagnate (even while incomes...

The latest polls showing Clinton would win the presidential election is more evidence to support my argument that trying to predict human behavior  — whether it involves economic decision making or politics decision making — involves dealing with a nonergodic stochastic process. Pollsters believe that if you take a RANDOM SAMPLE OF THE VOTING POPULATION ON DAY X  BEFORE THE ELECTION  and calculate the probability distribution of voting for the various candidates, then this x day before...

I guess it is time to publish this graph, from the USA NASA.gov site. My prediction: this series will soon be discontinued. I did add some text, as grading has tought me that even intelligent people often have difficulties with the interpretation of graphs. My interpretation: the ‘no warming’ meme, which has been quite influential in climate denial circles, is and Always has been bonkers and climate change is progressing faster than expected. But are these deniers really stupid, or bad at...

By David Orrell In a previous article for this newsletter, I wrote about the rather long and withdrawn grief process that the economics profession is working through, as it comes to terms with its role in what has become known as the Great Financial Crisis. Initial denial was followed by anger towards critics, which in turn was followed by a bargaining stage. The latter (I used Dani Rodrik’s book Economics Rules as an example) involved claims that there is nothing seriously wrong with...