Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll  So what is the MMT solution to dealing with inflation ex post—i.e. once the problem is here? There isn’t one. And I’d suggest running fast and far from anyone who offers you a quick and easy prescription for dealing with any and all inflation. Mainstream economists, of course, offer just such a solution. The Federal Reserve will fix it! After all, it’s already their job (dual mandate), and they can act quickly and “independently,” tightening policy without fear of any...

Are we living in an epoch of high inflation? it’s a difficult question to answer as we’re lacking the tools to do this. Economics – heterodox and mainstream alike – is lacking a profound ‘periodic table’ of prices. This hampers them when they write and talk about inflation. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. The framework of the national accounts provides us with the distinction between expenditure prices (investments, government purchases, household...

from Asad Zaman This lecture is about the personality of Sr Ronald Fisher and his foundational ideas about statistics. The idea that statistics is all about “data reduction” is due to lack of computational capabilities at the time of Fisher – it was not possible to analyze 1000’s of data points, without reducing them to manageable summaries. Even though computer capabilities now make this possible, intellectual inertia has kept the discipline of statistics bound to the now obsolete mold...

A conference by the World Economics Association (WAE) and IDEAs, 20th April to 20th May, 2022. Rationale This World Economics Association (WEA) – International Development Economic Associates (IDEAs) Conference, led by the Professors Alicia Puyana and Maria Alejandra Madi, calls for a pluralist reflection about current knowledge in...

from Dean Baker We all know about the Trumpers’ big lie: somehow millions of votes were stolen from their hero, but the liberals were so smart in their steal that Trump’s team can’t produce any evidence. That one rightly draws contempt from anyone not in the cult, but what about the big lie that the vast majority of intellectuals seem to accept? Regular readers know what I am talking about. The big lie is that the massive rise in inequality over the last four decades was somehow the...

from David Ruccio In the world according to Paul Krugman, “most Americans” have gotten considerably richer over the past two years (even if “the gains have been especially big at the top”), “lower-income Americans [have] seen relatively large income gains,” and “the simple story that the pandemic has been great for the wealthy and bad for the working class doesn’t hold up.” Really? To support his argument, Krugman trots out a series of charts from Realtime Inequality, which is in fact an...

from Lars Syll One of the most effective ways of clearing up this most serious of all semantic confusions is to point out that private debt differs from national debt in being external. It is owed by one person to others. That is what makes it burdensome. Because it is interpersonal the proper analogy is not to national debt but to international debt…. But this does not hold for national debt which is owed by the nation to citizens of the same nation. There is no external creditor. We owe...

from Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan Here is a silent killer. While the proportion of the world’s population subject to hunger keeps falling, that of the overfed, mostly with junk, is climbing. In 2005, the two trends crossed: for the first time in the history of humanity, the number of obese people surpassed that of the underweight, and the process continues unabated. The latest data, for 2016, show that almost 14% of the world’s population is now obese — nearly three times more...

from Prabhat Patnaik A crucial component of the imperialist system is the colonisation of third world minds that helps to sustain it. This colonisation is pervasive, but here we shall discuss only academic colonisation and that too relating to the social sciences. Social sciences are of critical importance because the problems of the third world are above all social problems, and since the colonisation of third world minds has the effect of inculcating in them the belief that imperialism...

from Dean Baker With inflation remaining stubbornly high for longer than I, and many others, expected, I want to take another stab at the argument of the inflation hawks. As a jumping off point, I will use the argument put forward by Larry Summers and Jason Furman, probably the two most prominent and coherent economists arguing that we have underestimated the risks of persistently high inflation.[1] There are three main components to the Summers-Furman (SF) argument. (Their arguments are...