Real-World Economics Review

from Feedspot The best Economics Book blogs from thousands of Book blogs on the web and ranked by traffic, social media followers & freshness. Economics Book Blogs Here are 15 Best Economics Book Blogs you should follow in 2024 1. Real-World Economics Review Blog The Real-World Economics Review blog serves as a critical platform for economists, scholars, and thinkers who challenge mainstream economic theories and advocate for more realistic, socially relevant approaches. It brings...

from Lars Syll We all heterodox economists who have chosen the road ‘less traveled by’ know that this choice comes at a price. Fewer opportunities to secure ample research funding or positions at prestigious institutes or universities. Nevertheless, yours truly believes that very few of us regret our choices. One doesn’t bargain with one’s conscience. No amount of money or prestige in the world can replace the feeling of looking in the mirror and liking what one sees. My friend Axel...

from Dean Baker It is more than a bit bizarre reading pieces that talk about automation or job-killing AI as something new and alien. These are forms of productivity growth. They allow more goods and services to be produced for each hour of human labor. Productivity growth is usually thought of as a good thing. It’s the reason that we don’t have half the U.S. workforce employed in agriculture growing our food. Instead, it is around 1.0 percent of the U.S. workforce, and we grow enough to...

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog Introduction: Beyond the Jungle For centuries, capitalism has told us that land is a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for profit. It has also sold us a dangerous myth: that humans are inherently competitive, isolated individuals, destined to fight for survival in a brutal world. According to this worldview, land belongs to those who claim it first and use it for personal gain. But this idea is not only destructive—it’s profoundly false....

from Peter Radford What?  Surely not!  How dare he suggest such a thing. What, you are correct in asking, am I talking about? The recent speech by a Department of Justice official who dared suggest that it is getting quite difficult to find a truly neutral technocratic expert to give testimony in court.  Imagine the cheek.  How dare he question ‘expertise’.  Especially economic expertise, which is, surely, the gold standard. Why did he say what he said? Because academics are apparently so...

from Lars Syll Based on our interviews, heterodox economics appears to be a positive project, inevitably defined somewhat in terms of the mainstream but not exhaustively so. It is also efficacious, with policy and real-world impact. It is a complex object, not amenable to definition by a single criterion. Its dimensions are partly intellectual, in terms of what it believes. It holds a realist position. It is concerned with asymmetric power relations, in the economy and in the economics...

from Peter Radford Is it a cult? Is it a guild? Both perhaps? I remember reading sometime not long ago that Steve Levitt was leaving Chicago.  Two things stood out in the article bringing that news:  first, Levitt said he was concerned that economics was becoming irrelevant; second, someone had told him he was not doing ‘proper economics’. Here’s a clue who that someone was: Heckman. Then, more recently, the Financial Times editorial page accused the economics discipline of becoming a...

This post was written because of a tweet by David Andalfatto, who wondered why medieval and early modern Europe, a society that built cathedrals, did not show any per capita growth. Per capita growth is an average, and when the rich get richer, it can increase even when the number of poor and destitute increases. The question is: was something like this the case in the time of the cathedrals? I won’t give a definite answer. But I will go beyond ´real´ GDP per capita (ultimately a...

from Lars Syll Few issues in politics and economics are nowadays more discussed — and less understood — than public debt. Many raise their voices to urge for reducing the debt, but few explain why and in what way reducing the debt would be conducive to a better economy or a fairer society. And there are no limits to all the — especially macroeconomic — calamities and evils a large public debt is supposed to result in — unemployment, inflation, higher interest rates, lower productivity...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh It is more than a year since China, reportedly in retaliation to US-driven restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors and related manufacturing equipment, imposed export controls on two crucial materials—germanium and gallium—that enter into the production of semiconductors and military and communications equipment (advanced microprocessors, fibre-optic products and night-vision goggles). Imposed in the name of safeguarding “national...