Real-World Economics Review

from C. P. Chandrasekhar Carbon prices in the European Union (EU), or the value of one unit of an EU allowance (EUA) that gives the holder the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide (or its equivalent of other greenhouse gasses), are soaring. From 33.69 euros per tonne at the beginning of the year, the prices of EUAs traded through the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) had risen to a high of 62.75 euros on September 9, or by more than 80 per cent. Since the ETS was created to generate...

from Dean Baker   Now that George W. Bush is back in the news with his attacks on the Trumpist insurrectionists, it might be worth reviving one of the great lines of his presidency. After the September 11th attack, when Bush decided to go after not just the terrorists who planned the hijackings, but all sorts of people around the world he didn’t like, he lumped them together as “evil doers.” That may not be the most eloquent phrase, but it works well as a description of the modern...

from Lars Syll Consider two elections, A and B. For each of them, identify the events that cause a given percentage of voters to turn out. Once we have thus explained the turnout in election A and the turnout in election B, the explanation of the difference (if any) follows automatically, as a by-product. As a bonus, we might be able to explain whether identical turnouts in A and B are accidental, that is, due to differences that exactly offset each other, or not. In practice, this...

from Nikolaos Karagiannis and RWER This short article on neoliberalism comprises three brief sections which discuss key theoretical notions, general practical issues, and worldwide experiences respectively while offering a facts-based assessment. Brief concluding remarks end the article. Theory Neoliberalism gained momentum in the 1980s and became distinct and recognizable as an ideology by the 1990s as the “Washington Consensus”.[1] Neoliberal theorists would suggest that their theories...

Source   “In the picture below I show the growth of $100 due to inflation using the traditional inflation metric (PCE deflator) used by the Fed in red, and an asset price adjusted metric, where the PCE deflator and the S&P 500 are equally weighted.”

from David Ruccio A funny thing happened on the way to the recovery from the Pandemic Depression: class conflict is back at the core of economics. At least, that’s what Martin Sandau (ht: bn) thinks. I beg to differ. But more on that anon. First, let us give Sandau his due. His argument is that the current labor shortages have shifted the balance of power toward workers (an issue I discussed a couple of weeks ago). As a result, economic analysis is starting to change: What this looks like...

from Dean Baker Greg Mankiw warned New York Times readers about the dangers of adopting the Biden agenda and moving more towards a European-style welfare state. In his piece, titled “Can America Afford to be a Major Welfare State,” Mankiw noted: “Compared with the United States, G.D.P. per person in 2019 was 14 percent lower in Germany, 24 percent lower in France and 26 percent lower in the United Kingdom. “Economists disagree about why European nations are less prosperous than the United...

from Edward Fullbrook In 1965 in Berkeley, California the New Left came into existence by finding a solution to what its founders called “the Monday night club problem”, a problem remarkably similar to the one that decade after decade emasculates “heterodox economics”.  In Berkeley there were numerous left-wing political groups, each based on a different set of underlying ideas, texts, and key terms, and that by long tradition met on Monday evenings.  Each of these groups had its own...

from Duncan Austin and RWER The “free market” advocate is in the dissonant position of wishing market actors to be the sole conferees of new property rights while also depending on the government to uphold a general rule of law which is the necessary condition for property to being meaningful at all. Indeed, because of the indispensability of the rule of law, we should be more accurate with our terminology. We never have “free markets”. We only ever have “enabled markets” – markets...