Real-World Economics Review

from Edward Fullbrook A few years ago, I wrote a novel that was published under a pen name and titled Two American Dreams; Which is yours?  Recently its publisher realized that, although set in the Sixties (mostly in Berkeley) this novel pertains to the coming US presidential election to a remarkable degree.  With that in mind, they submitted to Amazon a standard advertisement for the novel in both its paper and Kindle formats. Amazon says that such adverts are usually...

from Lars Syll To be fair to academia, it has realized that the pure DSGE model is incapable of explaining observable phenomena so they have introduced numerous amendments, known, oddly, as “imperfections” in the model. Long-term nominal contracts, other labour market frictions, imperfection in credit markets, all these and more are prayed in aid and, either rigorously or more usually ad hoc, introduced into the model, generating lags that mean it can be represented as fitting the data....

from Dean Baker The effort to bring back manufacturing jobs has been a major theme in the 2024 election. Both parties say they consider this a high priority for the next administration. However, there is a notable difference in that the Biden-Harris administration has actively supported an increase in unionization, while the Republicans have indicated, at best, neutrality if not outright hostility towards unions. This distinction is important in the context of manufacturing jobs. Many...

from Lars Syll This is not new to most of you of course. You are already steeped in McCloskey’s Rhetoric. Or you ought to be. After all economists are simply telling stories about the economy. Sometimes we are taken in. Sometimes we are not. Unfortunately McCloskey herself gets a little too caught up in her stories. As in her explanation as to how she can be both a feminist and a free market economist: “The market is the great liberator of women; it has not been the state, which is after...

from Peter Radford – a critique of the absurdity of economics I finally read “The Accountability Machine”, the book by Dan Davies.  It’s worth the effort.  You can read it in a number of ways.  As a peon to cybernetics and Stafford Beer.  As a critique of the absurdity of economics.  As a summary of the development of management theory.  Or as a summary of the ills of neoliberalism.  It’s a mash-up of all those.  It also has the great virtue of being very readable. Chapter Six will warm...

from Lars Syll Paul Davidson, the co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) and a leading Post Keynesian economist, died on June 20, 2024, in Chicago. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on October 23, 1930, about a year after the Great Crash of 1929. He was a staunch defender of the importance of John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas, he insisted, differed fundamentally from those of the Neo-Keynesians who came to dominate American macroeconomics after World War II. He viewed...

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog This is the second post in a sequence explaining post WW2 USA strategies for global dominance. For the previous post, see: Hudson on Super Imperialism 1 U.S. Financial Strategies for Global Dominance  Introduction: Michael Hudson, in his podcast and writings, provides a profound critique of the U.S.’s economic and financial strategies that have underpinned its global dominance. This blog post explores Hudson’s insights into the...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA Issue no. 108July 2024 download whole issue The creationist foundations of Herman Daly’s steady state economyJohn Gowdy and Lisi Krall2 Data: a critical perspectiveCarlos Guerrero de Lizardi16 Enlightenment Epistemology and the Climate CrisisAsad Zaman29 Fabulous MacroeconomicsGerald Holtham33 A Tour of the Jevons Paradox. How Energy Efficiency BackfiresBlair...

from Lars Syll We’ve lots of evidence from different times and places that the elasticity of output with respect to capital is indeed small. In his famous paper which kickstarted this approach to thinking about economic growth, Robert Solow estimated (pdf) that only one-eighth of the increase in US GDP per worker between 1900 and 1949 was due to increases in the capital stock. The rest, he said, was due to technical progress. In Fully Grown, Dietrich Vollrath estimated that from 1950 to...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh In the past three years, global food prices have been on a roller coaster, rising rapidly especially in the first half of 2022 due to a speculative bubble and then falling from July 2022 onwards (Figure 1). The phase of rising food prices led to increasing food prices around the world, especially in lower income countries—and this was obviously associated with growing hunger. According to the FAO, 122 million more people faced hunger in 2022...