Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll Every method of statistical inference depends on a complex web of assumptions about how data were collected and analyzed, and how the analysis results were selected for presentation. The full set of assumptions is embodied in a statistical model that underpins the method … Many problems arise however because this statistical model often incorporates unrealistic or at best unjustified assumptions … The difficulty of understanding and assessing underlying assumptions is...

from Dean Baker It is a complete article of faith in intellectual circles that the market is responsible for the rise in inequality that we have seen in the United States and elsewhere over the last half-century. Intellectual types literally cannot even consider the alternative that inequality was the result of government policies, not the natural workings of the market. The standard line is that technology and globalization were responsible for the increasing gap in income between people...

from Peter Radford Thank you Mariano Torras. You said the following in a letter to the Financial Times: “I would venture that there is a professional motive for perpetuating — through the use of elegant and abstract models — the fantasy that economics is a science.  The prestige, the stature and influence that such a myth permits is undeniable.  Yet, far more perniciously, the ostensible neutrality of “economic science” provides seemingly unshakeable ideological cover against critics who...

The Dutch September HICP inflation rate was 17,1%. One year ago it was 3,0%. Below, I will argue that this is a sign of kind of war economy, not of a cyclically overheated economy. Ways to mitigate inflation were pioneered by the English economist John Maynard Keynes in his ‘How to pay for the war‘. it’s useful to go back to his ideas. The first version was published in three parts in The Times of november 1939. It was partly based on his experiences in World War I and partly on the...

from Lars Syll It may be argued … that the betting quotient and credibility are substitutable in the same sense in which two commodities are: less bread but more meat may leave the consumer as well off as before. If this were, then clearly expectation could be reduced to a unidimensional concept … However, the substitutability of consumers’ goods rests upon the tacit assumption that all commodities contain something — called utility — in a greater or less degree; substitutability is...

real-world economic review issue no. 101   –   September 2022download whole issue Two conceptions of the nature of money Tony Lawson          2 How power shapes our thoughtsAsad Zaman         20 SARS-CoV-2: The Neoliberal VirusImad A. Moosa          27 The giant blunder at the heart of General Equilibrium TheoryPhilip George          38 A life in development economics and political economy: An interview with Jayati GhoshJayati Ghosh and Jamie Morgan          44 John Komlos and the...

from Dean Baker It is common for politicians and pundit types to speculate on when or whether China’s economy will pass the US economy as the world’s largest. The latest episode to cross my path was a column by David Wallace in the New York Times. There is little reason for this sort of speculation. China is already the world’s largest economy, its economy is more than 20 percent larger than the US economy, according to the IMF. Furthermore, it is growing considerably more rapidly...

Dean Baker revisits the major policy implications of the series. To Unf★ck America we need to lower the age for Medicare and expand Medicaid, add a public option to buy in, shrink the role of patents to bring competition back to the marketplace, and strengthen price controls on patented drugs. He also suggests policies at the state and local level like increasing minimum wage, providing unemployment insurance, creative work tax credits, and to increase corporate tax rates. He also urges...

from Lars Syll It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the null hypothesis, and interpreting the p-value as some sort of replication probability or as the posterior probability that the null hypothesis is true … It is shocking that these errors seem so hard-wired into statisticians’ thinking, and this suggests that our...

from Dean Baker The standard line in policy circles about the soaring inequality of the last four decades is that it is just an unfortunate outcome of technological change. As a result of technological developments, education is much more highly valued and physical labor has much less value. The drop in relative income for workers without college degrees is unfortunate and provides grounds for lots of hand wringing and bloviating in elite media outlets, but hey, what can you do?...