Real-World Economics Review

from Richard Norgaard 1 – From material progress to holistic survival and morality The coevolution of economism with the Econocene has led humanity to the brink of disaster. Faith in progress has long been a part of the problem. Actions to stave off climate change have been trimmed and delayed on the presumption that countering environmental destruction has the opportunity cost of foregone human wellbeing through further investments in technology that further increase the production or...

WEA Commentaries Volume 11, Issue 3Download whole issue An egalitarian carbon tax: revenue-neutral and dual policy package     Fausto Corvino WHAT IS ECOLOGY? What Economics Should Have Been     Gregory A Daneke The Theory of Competition of F.A.Hayek as an Inspirer of the Neoliberal Turn of the 1980s     Arturo Hermann Don Webber discusses his book, How to enhance your re- search: 100 practical tips for academics     Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira and Magali N. Alloatti...

The post 2009 decade will stand out as a golden age for economic statistics. I do not mean econometric analysis, I mean statistics like asset prices, rents or estimates of inequality and household income. The empirical basis for a truly scientific macro economics has finally become less shaky. On an irregular basis, I will publish some posts on some of the treasure troves which have become available. Here, already one example, based on the recent PhD of Matthijs Korevaar., ”Financial...

from Lars Syll Macroeconomists seem to me the biggest offenders in not taking such empirical issues (of practical data handling) seriously enough. This might sound like sheer contrarianism given that macroeconomists are constantly wielding data; after all, their business is analysing the behaviour of the whole economy and forecasting its future path. My concerns are, first, that too few think about the vast uncertainty associated with the statistics they download and use; and secondly,...

from Marc Lavoie MMT is without a doubt part of the post-Keynesian tradition. Besides the link between the government and the central bank, as well as a few claimed novelties, such as the MMT view of the Phillips curve, the implicit MMT macroeconomic theory relies on post-Keynesian macroeconomics and its belief that the market cannot be left on its own and thus must be tamed; MMT relies on a credit-creation view of banking – the endogenous money view of post-Keynesians, more specifically...

from Herman Daly The basic issue of limits to growth that the Club of Rome did so much to emphasize in the early 1970s needs to remain front and center, with recycling considered as a useful accommodation to that limit, but not a path by which the growth economy can continue. Well before becoming physically impossible the growth of the economic subsystem becomes uneconomic in the sense that it costs more in terms of sacrificed ecosystem services than it is worth in terms of extra...

from Lars Syll In her interesting Pufendorf lectures Nancy Cartwright presents a theory of evidence and explains why randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are not at all the “gold standard” that it has lately often been portrayed as. As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog (e.g. here and here), RCTs usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which its advocates portray it, cannot hide the fact that...

from The Guardian discrimination by date of birth Many economic assessments of the climate crisis “grossly undervalue the lives of young people and future generations”, Prof Nicholas Stern warned on Tuesday, before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. Economists have failed to take account of the “immense risks and potential loss of life” that could occur as a result of the climate crisis, he said, as well as badly underestimating the speed at which the costs of clean technologies, such...

from Lars Syll Last Friday, November 9, saw the big “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding Fathers of neoliberal/libertarian  free-market ideology … One episode in Milton Friedman’s career not celebrated (or even acknowledged) at last week’s centennial took place in 1946, the same year Friedman began peddling his pro-business “free market economics”...