Real-World Economics Review

from Robert Locke In the Collapse of the American Management Mystique, Oxford UP 1996, I wrote about the rapid decline in American staple industries,  “in automobiles and in the related industries of steel, glass, and tires.  The total number of workers in the automobile industry declined from 802,800 in December 1978 to 478,000 in January 1983.  By 1980 Japan had become the world’s major automobile producing nation.  As Japanese replaced American, American automakers world market share...

from David Ruccio According to a new study, The Geography of the Global Super-Rich, by Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Isabel Ritchie, the United States is home to the world’s largest number of billionaires, with 541, 30 percent of the total. China is second with 223 or 12 percent. Next in line are India and Russia, with 82 billionaires (4.5 percent) each. Germany is fifth with 78 billionaires (4.3 percent). The United Kingdom is sixth with 71 (3.9 percent). Switzerland has 58...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economists, such as Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, celebrate international trade (including outsourcing, which they argue is just another form of international trade) at every opportunity. But right now, voters—especially in the United States and the United Kingdom—aren’t buying what mainstream economists are selling. They are (as I’ve argued here, here, and here) ignoring the so-called experts. That rejection clearly disturbs Mankiw, who just adds fuel to the fire...

from Mouvement des étudiants pour la réforme de l’enseignement en économie (MEPREE) France and RWER #75 The basic background ideology: free individuals, free markets and “invisible hand” The e-Book overtly proclaims that it adheres to “methodological individualism”. That is, individuals are society’s point of departure. They are “free to choose”, between consumption and leisure for “Angela the farmer” and “Mary the employee”, e-Book’s typical consumer, and between leisure and...

from Mouvement des étudiants pour la réforme de l’enseignement en économie (MEPREE) France and RWER #75 “Students in economics all over the world were asking, just as I had asked a few years previously: why has the subject of economics become detached from our experience of real life?” (Camila Cea, Member of the CORE project, University of Chile.) AbstractThe CORE project is a response to students’ protests against teaching in economics. It wants “to make economics accessible and relevant...

Much of social science has come to rely on a set of analytical approaches intended to identify specific influences within a range of confounding factors. The object of analysis is to separate the strands, to distinguish different influences, to attribute influence to particular variables. This has to be done in the face of multiple, competing influences. As a discipline, economics goes about this in different ways. The traditional approach of classical economics is theoretical and...

rom David Ruccio U.S. Olympic rower Megan Kalmoe doesn’t want to talk about water quality anymore. As she explained on her blog, journalists are ruining the 2016 Olympic games by being “fixated on shit in the water.” We are American, and we are going to Rio to represent you in this potentially flawed and imperfect setting that you are trying so desperately to get the public to love to hate.  We are going to compete for medals to bring them home to you, and for you so that the US...

from Jayati Ghosh Even before the results of the UK referendum, the European Union was facing a crisis of popular legitimacy. The result, especially in England and Wales, was certainly driven by the fear of more immigration, irresponsibly whipped up by xenophobic right-wing leaders who now appear uncertain themselves of what to do with the outcome. But it was as much a cry of pain and protest from working communities that have been damaged and hollowed out by three decades of neoliberal...

from Maria Alejandra Madi At the beginning of XX century, Joseph Schumpeter developed the concept of creative destruction  to characterize the waves of development based on clusters of innovations -both technical and institutional. In the last decades, these waves have included petrochemical products, automobiles, information technologies and biotechnologies, especially genetic modification. Looking back, throughout the postwar era in advanced Western societies, scientific research and...

from David Ruccio Almost five years ago, I suggested we start calling things by their correct names. Take the working-class—people who are forced to have the freedom to sell their labor power for a wage. We refer to them as members of the middle-class (which needs to be “rebuilt“) and working families (who need to be helped) or, now as workers’ wages stagnate and the real value of the minimum wage declines, as the “feral underclass” (especially in theUK, in the aftermath of the...