Real-World Economics Review

from Blair Fix As 2021 comes to a close, I’m having a distinct sense of déjà vu. A year ago, I wrote a post celebrating COVID vaccines as a triumph of science. And I noted that vaccine discovery is a collective endeavour. The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks closely with the cumulative number of scientific papers, a bellwether for humanity’s collective knowledge. Here’s the trend: Figure 1: The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks with the cumulative number of scientific...

from Dean Baker From the way our policy types talk about patents, or refuse to talk about them, they must think that the constitution guarantees life, liberty, and people getting incredibly rich from patents. Even as this pandemic has been needlessly prolonged by patent restrictions on the spread of technology for vaccines, tests, and treatments, resulting in millions of preventable deaths, we are still seeing no real debate as to whether we want to rely on these monopolies as a primary...

from Lars Syll Statistical mechanics reasoning may be applicable in the economic and social sciences, but only if adequate consideration is paid to the specific contexts and conditions of its application. This requires attention to “non-mechanical” processes of interaction, inflected by power, culture, institutions etc., and therefore of specific histories which gives rise to these factors … Outside of very specific cases, statistical physics is more likely to provide useful metaphors and...

from Lars Syll A couple of years ago, former chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, wrote in an article in the Financial Times, re the increased demands for stronger regulation of banks and finance: Since the devastating Japanese earthquake and, earlier, the global financial tsunami, governments have been pressed to guarantee their populations against virtually all the risks exposed by those extremely low probability events. But should they? Guarantees require the building up of a buffer of...

PRE-SAVE 'ARE WE STILL DATING?' NOW! -- lnk.to/fFL83P This is an original composition by Eliot Dean Baker. Words & Music: Eliot Dean Baker

from Asad Zaman A previous post Quotes Critical of Economics collected assorted quotes which are useful in writing up different kinds of critiques of economics. In addition, I collected quotes from Romer’s Trouble With Macro which are sharply critical of economics. In terms of the “Loyalty, Voice, Exit” paradigm, I look for “Exit” quotes, which suggest that we need to throw out the entire discipline and rebuild on new foundations; for a proposed alternative, see “Uloom-ul-Umran: An...

Since the COVID pandemic, the United States and other countries have faced challenges in terms of economic recovery. This has resulted in issues such as supply chain disruptions and what has been reported as high rates of inflation. What is inflation? What is causing high inflation? Doug Becker speaks with Dean Baker. Dean Baker is an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Research Policy. He is the author of The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. For...

Inflation in the Euro Area is high and erodes the purchasing power of many (but not all) incomes. Bad. But it will be transitory. And there is no indication of endogenous macro-economic instability. Why do I think this? I’ll first discuss the (largely) transitory nature of the present price increases, macro (in)stability comes next. Graph 1 shows two metrics of inflation. The first is based on the ‘normal’ consumer price index, but this time without energy and without...