Real-World Economics Review

The population of Russia is growing again – because Russia accepts millions of Ukrainian refugees. Russia is supposed to be a world-class bully again – but if so (and it is indeed making things in Syria even more vicious than ‘we’ already did…) it is clearly playing outside its league. It is a country with a dwindling population and a dwindling GDP. But while preparing the graph above, I wondered why, after the post 1990 demographic catastrophe (look here  for a The Lancet article about...

The Big Picture Interview w/Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research (C.E.P.R.)/Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. President Obama is gearing up for a big lame-duck session fight for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Supporters and opponents of this deal call it "free trade" - are they both wrong? For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com....

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...

By Jamie Morgan Globalizations is a leading inter-disciplinary journal with an interest in political economy. It has notably published on exploitative work practices, the Arab Spring, land grabs, climate change, and the power asymmetries and future prospects of governance processes. The journal recently organized a special forum on Brexit. The forum includes contributions from many points of view: British history, the history of European integration, the role of class, the rise of the...

from Dean Baker Globalization and technology are routinely cited as drivers of inequality over the last four decades. While the relative importance of these causes is disputed, both are often viewed as natural and inevitable products of the working of the economy, rather than as the outcomes of deliberate policy. In fact, both the course of globalization and the distribution of rewards from technological innovation are very much the result of policy. Insofar as they have led to greater...

from Asad Zaman We cannot understand the world around us without a sophisticated understanding of the complex but intimate relationship between knowledge and power. One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, crafted a radically different understanding of this relationship. Instead of seeing power in brute force, he saw power as being the ability to shape knowledge. To understand Foucault, we must let go of our comfortable and conventional...

from Mark Weisbrot The international media has provided a constant fusillade of stories and editorials (not always easily distinguished from each other) about the collapse of the Venezuelan economy for some time now. Shortages of food and medicine, hours-long lines for basic goods, incomes eroded by triple-digit inflation, and even food riots have dominated press reports. The conventional wisdom has a set of predictable narratives to explain the current economic mess. “Socialism” has...

Thomas Kuhn once famously described textbooks as the vehicle by which students learn how to do “normal science” in an academic discipline. Economic textbooks clearly fulfil this function, but the pity is that what passes for “normal” in economics barely deserves the appellation “science”. Most introductory economics textbooks present a sanitised, uncritical rendition of conventional economic theory, and the courses in which these textbooks are used do little to counter this mendacious...

from Dean Baker The establishment is trying to pull a big one over on the public yet again. One of the designated topics for the last presidential debate goes under the heading, “debt and entitlements.” This should have people upset for several reasons. The first is simply the use of the term “entitlements.” While this has a clear meaning to policy wonks, it is likely that most viewers won’t immediately know that “entitlements” means the Social Security and Medicare their parents receive....

from Maria Alejandra Madi Since the late 1980s,  the World Bank has been defending a policy agenda that reinforces the free market model of endogenous economic growth where human capital plays an outstanding role since the acquisition of abilities would increase the productivity levels, and as a result, the income levels. In the model of endogenous growth, the evolution of the level of product per worker depends on the increase of productivity. Regarding the human capital model, the long...