Real-World Economics Review

from Blair Fix The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket. — Richard Feynman Like Richard Feynman’s game of science, evolution is stuck in a straitjacket. It is driven by chance. But evolution is not free to explore every path. Take, as an example, the evolution of organism size. While it seems like there are many routes to bigness, I propose that there is fundamentally only one: sociality. In the march towards ever-larger organisms, there have...

from Lars Syll What is to take the place of neoclassical economics and its neoliberal policy offshoot? There is no shortage of candidates, grouped under the broad banner of economic heterodoxy. Some of these successor doctrines – behavioral economics and complexity economics are examples of note – take the neoclassical orthodoxies as a point of departure. They therefore continue to define themselves in relation to those orthodoxies. Others avoided the gravitational pull altogether – or,...

from Peter Radford In this case geographical diversity. Dani Rodrik has brought to our attention a rather serious problem within the economics profession: it is still dominated by people living and working in the West.  As a consequence it has a decided bias towards issues that are of significant interest to the West. This is, of course, not news to any of you not living in the West.  Nor is it news to anyone outside the profession paying attention to the product of the journals and...

from David Taylor and WEA Pedagogy Blog Looking now at anticipations of Shannon’s information systems in recent economic research, Maria Madi found American pragmatist C. S. Peirce studying scientific logic cycles and semiotics (signalling) in 1873.  In the latest Real Word Economic Review, Katherine Farrell found Marshall starting economics from everyday life (small is beautiful) instead of the funding of government. Andri Stahel started from Aristotle and found Dilthey studying...

from Mitja Stefancic and current issue of WEA Commentaries “Power and Influence of Economists: Contributions to the Social Studies of Economics”, edited by J. Maesse et al reflects upon the multifaceted relationships that exist between science and society – a domain in which economic experts play a very influential role and often have a direct impact on society by and large. It offers complex insights into the forms of power in economics and provides a broad overview of recent...

from James Galbraith The evolutionary and biophysical approach to economic phenomena is not a new thing, and actually long predates the neoclassical orthodoxy from which some believe it now springs. It began with the intellectual interplay of Malthus and Darwin, developed through Marx and Henry Carey and (to a degree) in the work of the German Historical School, brewed and fermented in the pragmatic and pluralist effervescence of late 19th century American philosophy, and achieved a...

from David Taylor and WEA Pedagogy Blog After the invention of printing, pedagogy began with Machiavelli’s The Prince teaching politicians to lie, and Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning advising a new king to develop an encyclopedia of science “for the glory of God and the relief of Man’s estate” by “taking things to bits to see how they worked”.  Bacon’s doctor Harvey took men’s bodies to bits and discovered the circulation of the blood.  In France, Descartes took brains to...