Real-World Economics Review

from Nikolaos Karagiannis and Issue 94 RWER The practical use of the term “neoliberal” exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle. The second was economic hyper-globalization, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to new, more ambitious types of trade agreements. Financialization and hyper-globalization have...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] Varoufakis is undoubtedly right — there is indeed something about the way mainstream economists construct their models that obviously doesn’t sit right. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics would give way to...

from Peter Radford Don’t mind me.  I am just thinking out aloud… That we live in a Machine Age is indisputable.  Our lifestyles depend entirely upon the mediation of machines.  Without them modernity collapses back to whatever existed in the prior ages and we surrender most of what we currently cherish. And it is important to use the phrase “machine age” because other phrases such as Industrial Age and so on limit us.  Some say we are now entering a Digital Age, but this too is a...

from Lars Syll Mainstream economics nowadays usually assumes that agents that have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty behave according to Bayesian rules, axiomatized by Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1954) — that is, they maximize expected utility with respect to some subjective probability measure that is continually updated according to Bayes theorem. If not, they are supposed to be irrational, and ultimately — via some “Dutch book” or “money pump” argument — susceptible to...

from Norbert Häring Universal basic income has a lot of support among the left but also faces a lot of criticism or even hostility from the left. As on of the critics of I have used a book defending basic income against criticism from the left to check my beliefs against counter-arguments from the same side of the political spectrum and to clarify the reasons for not being convinced. One of Karl Reitter’s arguments in his book “Kritik der linken Kritik am Grundeinkommen” has indeed...

Why are we incentivizing wealth at the expense of health? Dean Baker (@Center for Economic and Policy Research) breaks down why our intellectual property system is in desperate need of reform. Produced by Matthew Kulvicki & Nick Alpha

from Lars Syll [embedded content] As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream economics — really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science. My own take on the issue is that economics — and especially mainstream economics — has lost immensely in terms of status and prestige...

“As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only indirectly inspired from ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an...

(Part of) the Dutch pension system will, if everything goes according to plan, soon be replaced with a new neoliberal system based upon, among other things, measured neoclassical ‘risk aversion’. However – economists are not yet able to measure this – which will lead to big problems. let me explain. The present system consists of: a social democratic element (the ‘first pillar’), a kind of not means tested basic income for everybody...

European Union Inflation Rate