Real-World Economics Review

from Richard Norgaard . . . until early in the 19th century, merely two hundred years ago, an effort to intertwine reality and morality still existed in natural theology, the project to understand the character, will, and operating manual of God through the study of nature. Isaac Newton was both an accomplished moral philosopher and a path-breaking natural philosopher (Iliffe, 2017). The Physiocrats made moral arguments about who should be taxed based directly on what they understood to...

Source: Sighing for paradise to come | The Economist

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog Reducing politics to rational calculation allows the destruction of entire countries, and killings of millions, for the sake of political power or corporate profits. Today this “rationality” dominates the world where corporations are busy destroying the planet for the sake profits. Introduction: The dark underside of leading lights of the European Enlightenment has been skillfully concealed. Nearly all major enlightenment thinkers held abhorrent views...

from Lars Syll The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment … But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live, is analysis … By biting off chewable portions of a much larger world, science makes it possible to achieve progress in our understanding of how things work...

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from Lars Syll The DSGE mainstream — which is made up of new classical macroeconomics and neo-Keynesianism — is unanimously based on the core assumptions that characterize the paradigm of social exchange theory. These are rationality, ergodicity and substitutionality, the exclusive acceptance of a formal mathematical-deductive, positivist reductionism. After the ‘empirical turn’ of the last two or three decades, these have been combined with sophisticated micro- and macroeconometrics, or...

from C. P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh Capitalism is supposed to be all about economic growth, through the dynamism that is created by competition. This growth is meant to be driven by investment (or accumulation) which in turn is used to justify the shares of national income that are delivered to private profits, to the owners of capital. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” famously said a certain Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital more than 150 years ago. It...

from Lars Syll That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting — indeed, it is under obligation to do so — from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form. But for reason to enter on the sure path of science is, of course, much more difficult, since it has to deal not with itself alone but also with objects. Logic,...

from Edward Fullbrook Over the weekend I read two articles (1, 2) in The Guardian about market-value.  One concerned the painter Bansky, the other a truffle hunter in Croatia. I’ve been fan of Bansky for twenty years, beginning when he was a local graffiti artist in my part of town.  A couple of years ago one of his paintings, Girl With Balloon, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London for £1.1m.  As soon as the auctioneer’s hammer fell, Bansky’s canvass “passed through a secret shredder...

from Blair Fix Over the last year, I’ve watched with horror and amusement as health agencies around the world flip-flopped their advice on how to deal with COVID. My horror comes from knowing this flip-flopping breeds mistrust in science. But I am (morbidly) amused because I know that uncertainty is a basic part of real research. For the public, ‘science’ tends to mean authoritative knowledge. But for researchers, ‘science’ is an iterative process, filled with wrong turns, new evidence,...