Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker From my Twitter feed it seems that Sarah Palin has been resurrected. All sorts of centrist-liberal types are yelling “drill baby, drill!” as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have been pushing for ignoring environmental regulations and even directly subsidizing fracking. While that is no doubt music to the ears of the fossil fuel industry, this is going backwards about as quickly as we can in our effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is an...

Egypt is alarmed. And rightly so. A war in one of the grain baskets of the world, Ukraine, will affect us all but Egypt, and Turkey, will be hit even harder than many other countries. And they know it. According to Reuters, “Egypt, often the world’s top wheat importer, is working on a plan to buy wheat from other regions rather than Russia and Ukraine … “There are 14 approved countries Egypt could import wheat from, some of which are outside Europe” … Russia...

from Lars Syll To understand real-world decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. To simply assume that economic processes are ergodic and concentrate on ensemble averages — and a fortiori in any...

Twentieth-century economics pretended to be a value-free science. Among the values in fact adhered to and promulgated are two that turn out to be especially problematic: the goal of economic growth, and the elevation of consumerism. Growth is a macroeconomic issue, while consumerism plays out on the micro scale of individual motives, choices, and actions. Mediating between these are business enterprises, especially corporations. These are the actors whose interests are served by the...

from Dean Baker From my Twitter feed it seems that Sarah Palin has been resurrected. All sorts of centrist-liberal types are yelling “drill baby, drill!” as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have been pushing for ignoring environmental regulations and even directly subsidizing fracking. While that is no doubt music to the ears of the fossil fuel industry, this is going backwards about as quickly as we can in our effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is an...

In the university, we need to open up and reorganize our antiquated departmental structures to recognize what’s been happening outside traditional economics departments.   Well before “neoliberalism’s” ascent in the 1970s, mid-century academic economics had largely purged their departmental curriculum of cross-disciplinary topics that it had inherited from 19th and early 20th century “political economy”: for example, the close study of legal systems, social relations and institutions,...

from Lars Syll MMTists often like to position themselves as the only ones to properly understand the ‘operational realities’ of modern monetary systems. Ironically, many of the claims made by MMTists on this topic are misleading at best. One common rhetorical tactic that I’ve noticed they employ, which often catches their critics out, is to use the term ‘government’ in a way that’s different typically from how it is used in mainstream economics. When they say ‘government’, they tend to...

from Dean Baker The General Picture: Policy Was Structured to Redistribute Upward I don’t agree with much about Ross Douthat’s politics, but he often makes some interesting points. He did so in his latest column on the Canadian “truckers” protest against vaccine mandates. Douthat argues that support for the protest stems from resentment by people who do various types of manual labor against the professional class. His point is that the latter have largely been setting the rules in ways...