Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker There is good reason for believing that the prices of many items that drove inflation higher in the last year have stopped rising and are may even be going in the opposite direction. Used cars are the best example. The CPI index for used vehicles rose 40.5 percent from January 2021 to January 2022. In the three months from January to April, the CPI index has fallen by 4.5 percent. More generally, the supply shortages that drove prices higher in 2021 seem to be replaced by...

from Neva Goodwin Starting in the early 1990s I have worked with a number of great colleagues to develop a full alternative that we call contextual economics. The name comes from our conviction that an economic system can only be understood when it is seen to operate within a social/psychological context that includes values, ethics, norms, motivations, culture, politics, institutions, and history; and a biophysical context that includes the natural world as well as the built...

Life expectancies in Europe went down in 2019 and 2020 in all countries bar Norway (figure 1). They tended to go down more in countries with a relatively low life expectancy (figure 2) – strong and outspoken tendency. Correlation is not causation. But it can be argued that health and morbidity and life expectancy are influenced by health outcomes during, especially, childhood, including in the in-utero environment (look here, especially 3.1 b and 3.1 c. Look also here). If that’s right...

from James Galbraith The useful economist The common characteristic of almost all of this work, excepting a few who preoccupied themselves with logical skirmishes with the neoclassical orthodoxy – e.g., the Cambridge-Cambridge controversies over the theory of capital (Robinson, 1956; Sraffa, 1960; Harcourt, 1972), or in microeconomics (Keen, 2011) – is that the protagonists were concerned, in the first place, with the practical questions of policy facing their governments or the...

Washington PostGreen EconomyThe Telegraph Hazel Henderson attacked economics as “politics in disguise” and demanded economists take account of quality of life.   And for two decades she offered moral support for this blog and the Real-World Economic Review. “The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.”

In 2019, the Irish rate of ‘gross fixed capital formation’ (which I hitherto will call fixed investment), was 54,6%. More than half of total national expenditure… This was over twice the rate in most other European countries. And three times the Irish rate in 2011 or the Italian rate in 2014. What happened? Was this real? Were they building three times as many houses and roads, buying three times as many planes and trucks and doing three times as much Research and Development (which is...

from Dean Baker The New York Times ran a piece discussing why innovations in cloud computing and artificial technology have not led to more rapid increases in productivity. It raises a number of possibilities, but leaves out an obvious one, increasing waste associated with rent-seeking. We clearly see an increase in waste associated with rent-seeking, the only question is whether it is large enough to have a notable effect on productivity growth. The piece actually touches on, without...

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from Jamie Morgan An interest in great inequality and rising inequality have become prominent features of our times. According to Oxfam in 2019 the 26 richest people on the planet had equivalent wealth to the 3.8 billion who comprise the lower 50% of the world population. The previous year it required the top 43 to create this equivalence. The 2020 Oxfam report adds a series of statistical claims: the world’s richest 1% have more than twice the wealth of 6.9 billion of the world’s...

from Fernando García-Quero and Fernando López Castellano Overconfidence in the magical thinking of technification, economic growth, the free market, and neoliberal globalization has led many to forget that the state is the main policy architect and actor when facing a crisis. Successful responses to Covid-19 have shown, once again, the central role of states in organizing political measures that foster and maintain the welfare of their populations, through actions to guarantee quarantine,...