Real-World Economics Review

from Maria Alejandra Madi The Call for papers for the current conference Food and Justice is now open. We invite you to submit a paper to [email protected] by 15th  September, 2016.  A paperback, Food and Justice, of conference papers will be published by WEA Books in the new year. Visit the Conference website http://foodandjustice2016.weaconferences.net/ Food production has always been present in the economic debate because of the concern about population growth and demographic...

Melissa and I made some pizza's for daddy date night

from David Ruccio Everyone has read or heard the story: the labor market has rebounded and workers, finally, are “getting a little bigger piece of the pie” (according to President Obama, back in June). And that’s the way it looked—until the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its data. What was originally reported as a 4.2 percent increase in the first quarter of 2016 now seems to be a 0.4 decline (a difference of 4.6 percentage points, in the wrong direction). What’s more, real hourly...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump seems to have driven a substantial portion of the media into a frenzy with his anti-trade rhetoric. While much of what Trump says is wrong, and his solutions are at best ill-defined, the response in the press has largely been dishonest. For example, a New York Times editorial tried to imply that there was an ambiguous relationship between the size of the trade deficit and employment in manufacturing. It pointed out that Japan and Germany, both countries with...

from David Ruccio Is education the solution to the problem of growing inequality? As I wrote in early 2015, Americans like to think that education is the solution to all economic and social problems. Including, of course, growing inequality. Why? Because focusing on education—encouraging people to get more higher education—involves no particular tradeoffs. More education for some doesn’t mean less education for others (at least in principle). And providing more education doesn’t involve...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The global scenario has restated the menace of deep depressions among the economic challenges. Indeed, in the current setting, the principles of corporate behaviour have reinforced the lack of commitment to long-run social and economic sustainability. Looking backward, in the context of the 1930 Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes pointed out that the evolution of capital markets increases the risk of speculation and instability since these markets are mostly...

from Peter Radford Last week I stirred up a certain curiosity as to why I had lumped Peter Drucker into the same bag as both von Mises and Hayek. Well, simply put, the three of them, along with Karl Popper and Joesph Schumpeter, had an enormous, even oversized, impact on modern economics. Yes economics. Let’s not fall into the same trap as economists do when they, with a sweep of their hands, dismiss business theory as not an aspect of economics. Of course it is. After all if business is...

from David Ruccio The world economy only grew by 3.1 percent in 2015. But the world’s billionaires did much better. As David Barks, associate director of custom research for Wealth-X, understands, “Wealth helps accumulate more wealth.” According to the latest Wealth-X report on the global billionaire population, the world’s billionaire population grew by 6.4 percent, to 2,473, last year. And their combined wealth increased by 5.4 percent, to a record $7.7 trillion.   Needless to say, the...

from Peter Radford Shocking is an understatement. Donald Trump is unfit for public office, be it town clerk or president of the US. He’s an unbalanced egomaniac. He’s a racist. He’s an immature misogynist. He’s many other awful things. Presidential, he is not. How did we get here? Failure. But a particular kind of failure. Failure dressed as success. A success so sweeping and deep that we hardly recognize the extent of the change that it wrought. Naturally I am speaking of the victory of...

from David Ruccio We’re all familiar with the usual indictment of the U.S. healthcare system: we pay much more and we get much less. For example, according to the Commonwealth Fund: Data from the OECD show that the U.S. spent 17.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2013. This was almost 50 percent more than the next-highest spender (France, 11.6% of GDP) and almost double what was spent in the U.K. (8.8%). Since 2009, health care spending growth has...