Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker With the United States data we have seen from the last few months, it’s fair to say that no one has a very good idea of where the economy is. At the most basic level, we have seen seven months of incredibly rapid job creation this year; the economy added 3.3 million jobs through July, along with two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We don’t have to join the Trumpers in calling this a recession, to be bothered by seeing two main economic indicators going in...

from Lars Syll The assumption of additivity and linearity means that the outcome variable is, in reality, linearly related to any predictors … and that if you have several predictors then their combined effect is best described by adding their effects together … This assumption is the most important because if it is not true then even if all other assumptions are met, your model is invalid because you have described it incorrectly. It’s a bit like calling your pet cat a dog: you can try...

from Peter Radford re-visiting economics’ basic concepts I am nothing if not annoying.  Allow me to elaborate. Let’s be basic. I mean really really basic. Our model world initially consists of two people, Adam and Eve.  I know, it’s been done before.  But we are economists.  What are we interested in?  What problems that Adam and Eve face do we want to study? Well, they need energy.  Human bodies, like all ordered structures, need flows of energy to maintain that structure.  The Second...

from Lars Syll The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris paribus stipulations. Despite their reference to reality, the laws stated by pure economics...

In this episode, I talked with Dean Baker, CEO of the Phoenix Group of Companies, a single-source provider of print solutions from concept to completion. Timecodes: 0:00 - Intro 0:41 - Dean’s origin story - how he came to be involved in direct mail 3:11 - The services Phoenix Group of companies provides 7:33 - Things marketers should keep in mind when choosing between digital vs offset printing 11:12 - How can print be sustainable? 14:53 - Some good ways to keep postage and paper...

from Ken Zimmerman  (originally a comment) Economic life is the activities through which people produce, circulate and consume things, the ways that people and societies secure their subsistence or provision themselves. Activities by which communities sustain themselves. ‘[T]hings’ is, however, an expansive term. It includes material objects, but also the immaterial: labor, services, knowledge and myth, poems, religion, names and charms, and so on. In different times and places, different...

Ms. UMBA

from Lars Syll Some years ago, in a lecture on the US recession, Robert Lucas gave an outline of what the New Classical school of macroeconomics today thinks on the latest downturns in the US economy and its future prospects. Lucas shows that real US GDP has grown at an average yearly rate of 3 per cent since 1870, with one big dip during the Depression of the 1930s and a big — but more minor — dip in the recent recession. After stating his view that the US recession that started in 2008...

This series is all about solutions. Learn more at http://unf-ckamerica.com Over the last four decades, the US economy has done quite well for the top 1%, but it has been stagnant for most Americans. This was not an accident, nor the natural workings of the market and certainly not an inevitability. US policies have been deliberately structured since 1980 to redistribute income upwards. In other words, the system has been rigged. Dean Baker shows us how public policy can be deployed to...

Dean Baker tells the dirty secret of the great billionaires of the modern age: they wouldn’t exist without intellectual property (IP), that is the copyright and patent monopolies guaranteed to private actors by the government. IP laws have been expanded and strengthened in recent years, making patent & copyright monopolies longer and stronger and enabling the vast fortunes of billionaires in computers, software, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment etc. Baker diagnoses the role of...