Real-World Economics Review

WEA Commentaries Volume 11, Issue 4 download the whole issue Pandora Papers and tax havens: what do they tell us?Mitja Stefancic Brazilian Foreign Policy: crisis and preliminary effects on International Cooperation and DevelopmentPatrícia Andrade de Oliveira e Silva and Pietro Carlos de Souza Rodrigues On Diane Coyle’s Cogs and MonstersLars Syll Combatting Global Warming: The Solution to China’s Demographic “Crisis”Dean Baker Regulation of international capital flows in developing...

from Lars Syll We live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty — not quantifiable stochastic risk — which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but ‘rational expectations.’ Our expectations are most often based on the confidence or ‘weight’ we put on different events and alternatives, and the ‘degrees of belief’ on which we weigh probabilities often have preciously little to do with the kind of stochastic probabilistic calculations made by the rational agents as...

from Dean Baker Okay, I’m a bit slow for a New Year’s piece, but what the hell, we can always use a bit of optimism. Anyhow, I thought I would spout a few things about what the world might look like if we didn’t rig the market to give all the money to rich people. Not much new here for regular readers, I just thought I would spell it on paper, since it is a nice backdrop for many of our battles. Before I go through my favorite unriggings, let me start by making a general point, which some...

About one month ago I wroute about Euro Area inflation: “troubling but transitory“. One month more of data are in. It is even more troublesome but also more transitory. The increase of the consumer price index is dominated even more by energy prices than one month ago. As the Euro Area is a net importer of energy (among other items: natural gas from Russia.). This particular kind of inflation is, to use confusing terminology, highly deflationary… (for the non-energy sectors)....

from Philip George How could the 1970s stagflation have been avoided? The stagflation of the 1970s is widely believed to have heralded the eclipse of Keynesian economics and the rise of monetarism. In a previous post (https://rwer.wordpress.com/2021/08/14/weekend-read-what-caused-the-stagflation-of-the-1970s-answer-monetarism/) I had argued that this was not the case and that the stagflation was directly caused by the monetarist policies of the time. But there is an even more important...

It still has to feed into the management of pension funds or global wealth funds. Or, does it? It seems that Black Rock is already investing more in real estate… Look here and here. It might well be that this happens because because the smarties at Black Rock read the work of Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick and Taylor, who gathered data on ‘‘The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015”, including the rate of return on ‘houses’ (better: the rate of return on ‘land underlying...

from Lars Syll Causal identification requires nonstatistical information in addition to information encoded as data or their probability distributions … This need raises questions of to what extent can inference be codified or automated (which is to say, formalized) in ways that do more good than harm. In this setting, formal models – whether labeled ‘‘causal’’ or ‘‘statistical’’ – serve a crucial but limited role in providing hypothetical scenarios that establish what would be the case...

from Dean Baker I have been engaging on Twitter recently on my ideas on repealing Section 230. Not surprisingly, I provoked a considerable response. While much of it was angry ad hominems, some of it involved thoughtful comments, especially those from Jeff Koseff and Mike Masnick, the latter of whom took the time to write a full column responding to my proposals on repeal. I will directly respond to Mike’s column, but first I should probably outline again what I am proposing. I somewhat...